Jeff Stamen of Cambridge Semantics has questioned whether Big Data is worth the hype or if the tech headlines should actually be touting Right Data. Stamen writes, “One look at all the IT headlines these days would suggest that Big Data is the most important data issue today. After all, with lots of computing power and better database storage techniques it is now practical to analyze petabytes of data. However, is that really the most compelling need that end users have? I don’t think so. Instead, I would claim that the issue most end users have is getting together the right data to help them do their jobs better, not analyzing billions of individual transactions.”

He adds, “What most end users want is the result of these analyses, not the raw data. They want to build decision rules relevant to them based on these insights. Plus, they want to combine the insights with only that part of the raw data that is relevant to them in the context of doing their job. For example, a customer rep dealing directly with a customer needs the full details of that customer’s previous interactions with the business that are relevant to the current call. This isn’t as much a matter of filtering through petabytes of Big Data as it is of getting the Right Data at the right time.

Stamen goes on, “The rep needs data about the customer’s interactions from lots of different data sources (purchase histories, support issues, call and email logs, payments, etc.), but he also needs to limit the information he sees to only the information that’s contextually appropriate. My colleague, Rob Gonzalez, calls this the horizontal big data problem; it’s the challenge of combining data not only from big centralized databases, but also from small local databases, spreadsheets, documents, and from the Web.”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ Earls37a