Data Is The New Oil And The Data Scientist To Connect The Dots

Posted by Gianluigi Cuccureddu SMP in Breaking News on January 16, 2012  |  0 Comments More from this author  |    |  Follow Gianluigi Cuccureddu SMP on: Facebook | LinkedIn | Twitter |

Mashable reports that “some 63% of data scientists say the profession is going to be undermanned for the foreseeable future — and half of those see it as a serious shortage. In particular, the explosive growth of sensors — the so-called “physical Internet” — will provide organizations with an unprecedented wealth of data.”

According to Andreas Weigend, Head of the Social Data Lab at Stanford and the former Chief Scientist at Amazon, in a statement:
“Unfortunately, the technology has evolved faster than the workforce skills to make sense of it, and organizations across sectors must adapt to this new reality or perish.”

Oracle: firms underestimating big data

Research by Oracle has concluded that firms are caught off-guard by the boom in big data. SiliconRepublic goes further:
There is also evidence that the boardroom is paying closer attention to data matters at many organisations, suggesting data within the business is being recognised as having an inherent high value.

John Caulfield, solutions director at Oracle explained:
“The characteristic big data is typically high volume and high velocity but of low individual value and the way you value this is the variety of data when it is brought together to be analysed it is informative, but these bits on their own don't make much sense and that's where the confusion lies.
Simply put, Big Data means a lot of data. It could be something of obvious value, like a sales order in an enterprise management system or a weblog of a search for a music book that on its own is of little value. But bring all this data together from web logs to social media, blogs and tweets, and there is opportunity there to derive significant value and be able to predict, analyse and forecast what people will be buying any given weekend, for example."

Making sense of the TV data

Social TV, interactions with and around content is increasing, where television fans want to be involved and where 76% of the UK TV audience is media stacking, data is definately the new oil, the new foundation for a much more fact-driven organizational model, informing departments to quickly react and adapt.

But also think about the multi-screen experiences, ubiquity and the intel that can be extracted from the consumed content in its context (time, place, etc).

Improving current revenue streams and opening up new ones

Being able to rightly interpret all this data will enable to improve current advertising,audience engagement, audience segmentation and content (via co-programming for instance). Secondly, to decrease dependancy on current revenues, new ones can be relevantly and personally offered, depending on the interpretation of the data. Think of relevant multiscreen experiences, contextual enrichments, virtual goods.
Data scientists connect the valuable dots!

Have a look at the detailed infographic by EMC that summarizes the survey data.