Luxembourg 23 May 2011

(by Ton Zijlstra)

A new report by business consultancy firm McKinsey calls Big Data "the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity."

Saying that data has been part of the impact of information and communication technology for a long time, it signals that Big Data is different. Sufficiently different to make data skills in analyzing big data sets will become a key basis of competition, and a trigger for new productivity growth and innovation. That is, if the right policies and enablers are in place.

The report has looked at five domains (health care, retailing, the public sector, manufacturing, and personal location data) and sees five broad ways to leverage 'Big Data'.

• Making big data more accessible in a timely manner
• Using data and experimentation to expose variability and improve performance
• Segmenting populations to customize actions
• Replacing and supporting human decision-making with automated algorithms
• Innovating new business models, products and services.

The biggest hurdle in all of this is facing the shortage of people with analytical skills to handle big data, and having managers and analysts skilled enough to understand and base decisions on the analysis of big data. Other concerns are privacy and data security. Both the executive summary (PDF) and full report (PDF) are available for download, as well as e-book versions for different hardware platforms (see links at bottom of this page).