Big data: The next frontier (McKinsey&Company Report)

To be honest, I have been skeptic about the whole "Big Data" concept. I have discussed it with some Computer Science friends and most of them have called it a "marketing scheme" or just another way of calling "Data Mining" (a new name for the same old stuff).

In my quest of finding answers to my own skepticism, I found the following white paper/status report from McKinsey & Company which helped me get some "buy-in" in the whole "Big Data" concept. I highly recommend it to everybody in class; it's extremely interesting and I think McKinsey& Company did a great and thorough job in describing the current status of "Big Data."

The following are some quick interesting facts listed at the beginning of the paper about the scale of "Big Data" - for the "non-believers" (dated May 2011):

• $600 to buy a disk drive that can store all of the world's music
• 5 billion mobile phones in use in 2010
• 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month
• 40% projected growth in global data generated per year vs. 5% growth in global IT spending
• 235 terabytes data collected by the US Library of Congress in April 2011
• 15 out of 17 sectors in the United States have more data stored per company than the US Library of Congress
• $300 billion potential annual value to US health care - more than double the total annual health care spending in Spain
• €250 billion potential annual value to Europe's public sector administration - more than GDP of Greece
• $600 billion potential annual consumer surplus from using personal location data globally
• 60% potential increase in retailers' operating margins possible with big data
• 140,000 - 190,000 more deep analytical talent positions, and 1.5 million more data-savvy managers needed to take full advantage of big data in the United States

To view/download the file, please click here