Does big data mean big problems?

The subject of Big Data is currently reaching the level of hype previously reserved for Social Media, Web2.0 and the dotcom boom & bust before it. Just like these previous concepts... big data is large enough, complex enough and technical enough to bewilder a lot of 'normal' people. And like its predecessors, it is sufficiently hard enough to describe... however I like the explanation:

"Big Data is anything that doesn't fit into an Excel spread sheet"

However it is obvious that some companies are making progress with big data... whilst others, especially the consultancies, are keen to make out they have been involved with big data since before it was big news.

Of interest to me was this video posting by McKinsey, which explains how to deliver big data and the necessary analytics tools into the hands of  managers who need it.
http://www.mckinsey.com/features/advanced_analytics

However I think the challenge with all of this talk about big data is not only of defining it , but also getting started in the subject. You can talk about big data all you like, but how do you actually start making progress with analysing it and when does it actually become database administration (which has been dealing with gigabytes of data since before the dotcom bubble).

Agile Digital Strategy - part 3

This is the third part of a series of postings about Agile Digital Strategy. Part 1 and Part 2 are already available.

For those who lived and worked through the dot.com gold-rush and the subsequent bursting of the bubble, it was a frantic and intoxicating period of rapid product releases and constant delivery. All manner of effort was put into "just get it up there" in the hope that you had struck the right combination to make a fortune.

As we now know... like a powerful car without a steering wheel... effort with no direction is a flawed strategy.




What did we learn from this? Well....

1. Release cycles were much shorter.
   This was mainly out of fear that if you didn't get something up first, then you had lost the initiative and consequently market share of user eyeballs or registration sign-ups.
   
   However it taught us that we could get something out of the door quickly when we wanted to (although I'm sure there's a quality / effort / functionality diagram to highlight the inherent problems with this approach)
   
2. That in an unknown market, where you can't learn too much from what has gone before (A.K.A. making it up as you went along) just doesn't get you as far along your progression path as all your effort would indicate.