Big Data and Cloud Computing Demand a Cognitive Shift
February 12, 2012
It seems that the world’s tech consciousness is at the crux of a hockey stick curve of innovation, growth and connectivity. Two of the hottest tech trends of 2011, big data and the cloud, can take a lot of the credit for the cognitive shift that is already happening. It’s the realization that these two concepts are in fact intuitively inclined to bring together siloed departments and processes to work to achieve new levels of social, customer, and organizational awareness. This past year has been a wake up call to many organizations that a new kind of thinking is required for 2012, it’s time to take advantage of all this newly accessible information and turn it into knowledge…
While the idea of ‘big data’ is nothing new, the term is. It’s meaning has been defined dissected,muddled, and debated all year. And, it plays hand in hand with another deceptively vague buzzword, the ‘cloud’. There is no denying that people will continue to pick apart the applications, standards, benchmarks, and problems with the two but I’d like to take this opportunity to point out the silver lining – IT and Business are finally speaking the same language. Each maintains their own dialects and tools but they are now realizing the opportunity for productive collaboration – marrying analytical technology with social data. The fact that big data is largely coming from social, mobile and non-traditional data sources is no coincidence.
How can we even talk about the big data circus without mentioning its most popular attraction, the social media sideshow? Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture. People (aka “consumers”) are fundamentally changing the way they perceive the world. This perception is altered by social connections. These social connections are now ‘event-based’ transactions that are quantifiable. This requires companies to think differently in order to understand and adapt to the rapid rate of the infinitely expanding digital universe (aka “the internet”) and the escalating expectations of itssentient, dynamic and unpredictable user base. Now that companies have this information, they are required to work with IT, marketing, and business development to make sense of it all.
Over the past 30 or so years, cognitive science proved time and time again that people are much more social that formerly believed. With today’s advanced message boards and instant gratification, businesses are realizing that big data, cloud computing and social media are all just part of the same natural cycle in evolution. The environment is changing, and companies have an unprecedented chance to help guide and educate people through a transition that can feel as abrupt as the shift from analog to digital.
There’s no turning back now, but don’t worry – 2012 will not be the end of the world – it’s the beginning of a different kind of thinking.
While this remains very much an opnion based post, I’d like to open this up for comments and quesitons. What would you do if you had all the data you could ever dream of in the palm of your hands?