More KM and Big Data

In my last post regarding Big Data I posed two questions: What is your experience with Big Data? Are you like most of us determining what Big Data really means to me and my organization? As it pertains to Knowledge Management (KM) and Big Data within organizations, the advancement of search technologies on Big Data is making an impact. In KM World's 100 companies that matter in KM, they point out that Search Technologies’ ability to implement, service, and manage Big Data environments is the key reason for their inclusion. The "findability" of information and knowledge within large amounts of unstructured data contribute to the ability to disseminate and reuse the knowledge of the enterprise.
Besides Search Technologies, there are several companies offering KM solutions to address Big Data. Some of these companies include: CACI which offers solutions and services to go from data to decisions, Autonomy (an HP Company) offers KM solutions that mine unstructured data, tag this data and where appropriate make it available to the knowledge base, and IBM who offers a Big Data platform that includes KM to address Big Data's vast amount of unstructured data. As organizations come to know more about Big Data and how to manage and use/reuse the vast amounts of information and knowledge it provides, more software and consulting companies will provide the products and solutions organizations are looking for. Where is Big Data going? A recent Gartner Report stated that "Many global organisations have failed to implement a data management strategy but will have to as IT leaders need to support big data volumes, velocity and variety," as well as "decisions from big data projects for decision support, and insights in the context of their role and job function, will expand from 28 per cent of users in 2011 to 50 per cent in 2014.” Big Data will be the catalyst for an increase in the need for Data, Information and Knowledge Management expertise. We will need Big Knowledge Management to address Big Data!

Knowledge Management and BIG Data

Big Data has been buzzing for some time now. Many organizations  are formulating their approach to managing Big Data and aligning it with their strategic objectives. Lets first take a look of what Big Data is; Big Data refers to data that has grown so big it is difficult to manage. Big Data spans four dimensions Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity.

Volume: The proliferation of all types of data expanding many terabytes of information.Velocity: The ability to process data quickly. Variety: Refers to the different types of data (structured and unstructured data such as text, sensor data, audio, video, click streams, log files, etc.) See what IBM is saying about Big Data.

Knowledge Management has the ability to integrate and leverage information from multiple perspectives. Big Data is uniquely positioned to take advantage of KM processes and procedures. These processes and procedures enables KM to provide a rich structure to enable decisions to be made on a multitude and variety of data. In the KM World March 2012 issue it was pointed out that "organizations do not make decisions just based on one factor, such as revenue, employee salaries or interest rates for commercial loans. The total picture is what should drive decisions". KM enables organizations to take the total picture Big Data provides, and along with leveraging tools that provide processing speed to break up the data into subsets for analysis will empower organizations to make decisions on the vast amout and variety of data and information being provided.

What is your experience with Big Data? Are you like most of us determining what Big Data really means to me and my organization? If these and other questions are on your mind concerning Big Data I want to hear from you!