Now that the technology barrier is no longer an issue for big data, there's a lot of talk about the cultural barrier to the
application of big data. What's often overlooked is that the issue is far more fundamental, and far deeper rooted in the historical development of the corporation and in the particular role given to analytic skills in the corporate world.
The fundamental challenge facing big data is that for the
longest time there has been a distinct separation of functions between the "business
types", the "creative types", and the "numbers guys".
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| Image courtesy of www.careercast.com |
What this means is that, if you look in a sales or marketing departments or to the top levels of most companies today sure there might be a half dozen people who did first year statistics, but the department will be made up of mostly of business types and creative types and there'll be a distinct lack of numbers types.
Not only that, but the other two groups have very limited
skills when it comes to understanding and evaluating data and numbers.
Even if you have big data tools which provide answers - people
want an explanation. Asking these groups who are under-equipped to be able to
understand or interpret the data to make decisions based on something which
they can't understand is something which is both challenging and often
threatening to people who are suddenly left with a horrible feeling of
"the nerd is telling me how to do my job".
The challenge facing big data, is that we need to re-train
the old guard and the leaders of today to understand not just the value of
data, but the means of processing it.
More importantly, we need to ensure that the corporate leads
of tomorrow are comfortable with numbers. Not everyone needs to be a data
analyst, but a big part of business will be being comfortable with the concept
of data analysis and data driven decision making processes.
