Harnessing Big Data: Connecting the Seen and Unseen
By Lori Lewis
Senior Marketing Leader, HP Enterprise Services – Applications and Business Services
“We are drowning in information and starved for knowledge.” This statement is by an unknown author, but it so perfectly captures the state of the information world today, doesn’t it?
When you look at all the data that surrounds us and how quickly it’s growing – 50 percent per month! – it’s no wonder so many organizations are having a hard time figuring out what to do with it and how to manage it.
At HP and Autonomy, we use the term “human information” to describe information that is created by people during everyday interactions – the ideas, thoughts, and opinions people express – often when talking about brands we connect with every day. It’s generated by things like email, audio, video, social networking, blogs, call center conversations, and machine-generated sensor data. Much of it is unstructured, meaning it isn’t contained by traditional databases in traditional formats. And it makes up about 85 percent of all data!
This information contains the traditionally “unseen” characteristics of your customers – what they say, what they mean, how they feel. When you combine this with the “seen,” or known characteristics of your customers – what they buy, where they live, how old they are – you get valuable insight that you’ve never had before. (Watch this video to learn more about the “seen and unseen”)
But the business intelligence systems in many companies and organizations are not able to process or incorporate human information. Perhaps it’s because the information is largely unstructured. Or maybe it’s the volume, the complexity, and the speed that characterize these new types of information. In some cases, organizations still don’t see the value of incorporating this information with their traditional database-driven data.
Make no mistake. This is the future of information computing and it represents a fundamental shift in the way people and businesses interact with information. We are living in the era of human information and the big news is what it can do for us. Human information holds big answers, hides big value and promises big changes.
At the Gartner BI Summit in Los Angeles next week, I will join Nicole Egan, Chief Marketing Officer, HP Information Management, in a Solution Provider Session, where we will talk more about human information and big data. We’ll discuss why it’s so different, how to extract value from it, and what it can do for your organization. We’ll look at examples of companies that are successfully leveraging 100 percent of enterprise-relevant information to drive context-aware computing and pattern-based strategies.
Please join us on Monday, April 2, at 3:45 p.m. west coast time in Diamond Ballroom 3 at the Gartner BI Summit.
