by Angela Guess
Marius Moscovici recently opined in The Next Web, “Collect it, store it, crunch it, display it… big data has always sounded more like a candy-store display than something businesses use everyday. This past year, as the Economist Intelligence Unit reported, big data finally hit adolescence, creating a rift between companies who still wrap it in nice packages and those who use it to change business. Storing that data for ‘someday’ use or turning it into pie charts isn’t enough. Just as a LinkedIn or Facebook feed shows highlights so you don’t have to visit individual pages, users now realize they want the same from their data. Mature data-driven businesses find the specific data they need to answer their questions, and integrate insights into the very fiber of the business. In the future, this will be the only way to thrive. And the dashboard has no part of it – the business intelligence dashboard is dead.”
Moscovici continues, “From IBM’s purchase of the Weather Company’s data to Marc Cuban’s investment in the real-time sports data provider Sportradar, corporations and venture investors are placing big bets on tools that make data actionable. Those tools will open new markets in everything from fantasy football to disaster preparation. AngelList reports more than 3,000 startups that specialize in processing data in innovative ways, creating new markets and new opportunities as they go. The game has changed from gathering, storing and reporting on data to putting data to work. The volume of data has grown to the point that the BI dashboard itself is based on obsolete principles. The dashboard was invented at a time when companies still stored their own (limited amounts of) data. Dashboards only offered insights because data pools were the size of a pond, not the Pacific Ocean.”
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