The New York Stock Exchange generates one terabyte of data each day; Twitter eight terabytes; while a Boeing 747 generates about two petabytes of information in a single day.
As more and more data is generated, it becomes more important for businesses to figure out how to handle this information, said Adrian Wood, director of emerging technologies at Hitachi Data Systems, at an event hosted by the company in Rosebank last week.
"The hype around big data is similar to what we experienced with cloud five years ago," said Wood, noting that when used effectively, this data can make business processes run more smoothly and has the potential to add value to society and to make society and business more efficient, while making our lives a little better.
Wood noted that effectively leveraging big data involves gaining greater insight from this massive store of information. One area of focus for Hitachi is utilising big data to develop and promote social innovation solutions that have the potential to improve lives. "Big data really is about 'what if' questions," he said. "What if electricity was smarter; if we could use information to make public transport and mining safer; what if the retail assistant knew what you wanted to purchase?"
Wood went on to unpack various examples of how effectively leveraging big data can help business and government better understand people.
In the US, he said, dashboard camera data was analysed to determine what makes certain intersections more dangerous than others. In Japan, customers were fitted with sensors to understand shopping trends and to deploy retail assistants to customers who were standing still for an extended period of time and more than likely needed sales assistance, he said.
According to Wood, this smart sales strategy increased sales by 15%. At a hospital in the UK, the effective use of patient information is allowing doctors and nurses to better meet the needs of their patients.
"These are all real life examples of how big data is changing the way that people are doing business," he concluded. "Big data can be used to help governments and organisations get the most efficiency out of limited resources. Yes, there is a lot of hype around big data, but it is this hype that is allowing us to use big data in innovative ways."
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