Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity

Ugh, I'm getting really frustrated with HN. Nowhere in the article does it mention anything about "Starting a Company". The message is clearly directed at big businesses.

Please fix the title appropriately.

/frustrated

It goes something like this:

Some manager sees a problem at work and mentions it to his golfing "buddy" at the 19th hole, who is a consulting senior partner at some management consulting company.

A week later he gets a call from his golfing buddy inviting him to discuss those problems over lunch. A proposal is made and the manager then contracts the management consulting company to do an "investigative study".

Consultant(s) are flown in from various distant places and disrupt the business with lots of inane questions for two weeks. Managing partner appears onsite on the first day and last day (if you are lucky). The junior management consultant is then tasked to write up a report, that the senior manager puts his name to.

The invoice arrives for 1 million dollars. Report doesn't get read by the business and nothing changes. Management consultancy blames business for ignoring advice.

Cycle goes on. Golf gets played. Drinks at the bar, manager spills his guts about problems at work to his management consultant golf buddies, who are just a little less drunk than he is. Expenses accounts get charged.

The long con....

N.B. You will notice that the management consultancy expense account is charged when reeling in the client at the golf club bar, whilst the expense account of the "mark" starts to be charged when the ink on the contract is still wet.

Why all the hate for "Big Data"? Other than that it is a shiny MBA term that cannot, god forbid be part of hacker terminology.

Lets focus on the Enterprise tools sector, since this is a large, rich market that is yet to be tapped properly. Imagine every single piece of data from customer contact points to orders to cases to actual product usage. Imagine being able to use a tool that can take all this data and show it in pretty graphs that you can use to decide how many millions to spend where. We dont have these tools today. Oracle's BI is bloated, and there honestly are not that many tools out there that can process large amounts of data while integrating successfully with a thousand different other tools that generate this data. Every single system now tracks data..but it goes nowhere, just a large tape to be stored away into eternity while the decision makers are still struggling with massive excel sheets.

Custom solutions become obsolete as soon as one of the other systems get upgraded, so this is a great opportunity for a cloud or packaged software. And for those of you who dont want to work in backend data processing, understand that the biggest component of Big Data is the UI - The data needs to be presented in the most useful manner possible.

So that mckinsey can Steal more money by sending those BigData Expert MBAs.

This is a classic case of an industry that has grown before the tools. Who would have thought we will be carrying supercomps in our pockets to generate so much data?

Translation: adopting the marketing/business fad of the day is important for your company even if it has no relation to your business whatsoever.