The “Next Big Thing” series: #BigData

{this is No. 2 of the “Next Big Thing” blog post series, which discusses the revolution to come through ongoing innovation in IT and the challenges involved with’em}

When working to compose a definition of what BigData really is, I discovered a good blogpost by CloudVane from earlier this year. CloudVane nicely outlines why BigData as such is essentially a concept – not a technology or a pattern or an architecture. The term BigData summarizes the

• legal
• social
• technology
• application and
• business

dimension of the fact that through applications being consumed from the internet, through us being constantly connected, through us sharing loads of content with our social worlds, … a vast amount of information is generated and needs to be managed and efficiently used.

To begin with, the main challenge of the BigData concept was not technology but businesses’ complete lack of vision what to do with all the information gathered. Technology stacks and architecture weren’t a problem for long – though they have matured over time either, of course. However, the biggest concern of businesses was (and sometimes still is) how to use that vast amount of data they suddenly became the master of. Hence, a solid BigData strategy of a certain business does not only need to have a clear understanding of how to collect and master data technically but rather to create a vision of what to derive from it and how to add business value through it.

Clearly, technology does have a role in it. And IT leaders must back business strategists by striving for mastery of the evolving BigData ecosystems within their IT landscape. Besides becoming specialists of newly introduced BigData and Analytics technology (Hadoop, Hive, Pig, Spark, …), this specifically means to have an orchestration story ready, that enables an enterprise’s legacy IT to integrate with all those new services introduced through new data strategies. Automation and orchestration architecture therefore will become a core role within the IT organization in order to support businesses in their striving for data insight and value.

{No. 3 of this blog post series is about a social revolution to come}