What’s next in Big Data? And when exactly would that be?

Everyone involved in Big Data of course has read the seminal McKinsey report with the promising title Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. In May 2012, exactly one year after publication, Michael Chui, one of the authors, was on stage at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium. There we heard the following remarkable words:

‘There are no [Big Data] best practices. I’d say there are emerging next practices.’

This seems to be contradictory to the title of the aforementioned report but the similarity and the elasticity is in that tiny word “next”. To innovation, competition, and productivity Big Data indeed may bring new prosperity but hard proof is not yet on the table. Work in progress Organisations are experimenting but it remains too early for best practices that could simply be followed and tweaked by others. Big Data still is very much work in progress. Speaking of its predicted prosperous effect on innovation and competition, remaining in progress forever would even be logical, since both entail continuous development and dynamism. Social Analytics Social Analytics, the station in between Web Analytics and the so-called Next Generation Analytics predicted by Gartner, is now in particular at the forefront of Big Data development and dynamism. Here again we encounter this ominous and treacherous “next.” It signals this familiar discussion of the glass being half full or half empty. Sullivan McIntyre of Radian6, now part of Salesforce, is devoted to the first opinion. He is keen to stress that “it becomes increasingly possible to make guesses about future behavior.” Paul Barrett of Teradata rather cautiously characterizes the phase we are in as “the early, black and white TV stage of Social Analytics.” Big Social So the question remains exactly when we would be able to upgrade from black and white to color, and after that perhaps even HD or 3D. In our new Big Data research report, simply called “Big Social,” we will provide you with enough ammunition to judge for yourself and keep track of all rapid development in the realm of Big Social Data and Analytics.