Marketers are becoming as insecure about big data as they already are about mobile. It’s like the middle school dating scene – you think everybody else is doing it but you.
Don’t buy into the hysteria. Relax. Big data is real, alright. And, its potential really is quite vast. But its buzzword-du-jour status right now causes marketers unnecessary angst. Nobody wants to be perceived as anything less than cutting edge, and it’s a status thing to say you’re “doing big data.”
Before you hire the Hadoop gurus, ask yourself if your operation is ready to use big data. Are you already wringing enough insight out of your existing customer databases and retention data to move the attrition needle down a few ticks? Are you mining data out of your existing digital analytics tool sufficiently to inform decisions about content?
If the answer is no, then queuing up big data could be like buying your kid a new Escalade when he’s still learning to drive the 2003 Honda Civic.
As I said, big data has great potential – yet data won’t become insight until you ask questions and use it to get the answers. Let’s make sure that paradigm is working on the regular data before rushing to harness big data.
What I like about this post is that it gives parity to the varouis types of thinking and encourages us to see Agile as part of a wider toolkit, rather than something that we do’ exclusively to the exclusion of all others. In doing this it discourages the tendency towards a dogmatic or ideological application of Agile’ It is all to easy to say to account for things by saying, It’s because we’re [doing] agile’ rather than giving a meaningful explanation forthe thinking behind our actions.One thing I think is missing is that key to the success of Agile is that Agile Thinking finds expression in tangible, pragmatic Agile Methods. To quote John Seddon Management is all about method'[1]Or in the words of Lou Reed Between thought and expression, lies a lifetime'[1] John Seddon: Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, Triachry Press 2008 p181
With Big Data in the news all day, you would think that having a lot of high quality data is a guarantee for new revenues. However asking yourself how to generate new revenues from existing data is the wrong question. It is a sub-optimal question because it is like having a hammer and assuming everything else is a nail.