Think Bigger: Developing a Successful Big Data Strategy for Your Business - Hardcover

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Mark van Rijmenam is the founder and CEO of Datafloq.com. He is an expert on AI, Blockchain and Big Data, a highly sought-after speaker and author of the book Think Bigger. He is also co-author of the book Blockchain: Transforming Your Business and Our World, on how blockchain can be used for social good. He is named a global top 10 Big Data influencer and one of the most influential Blockchain people. He is pursuing a PhD at the University of Technology, Sydney on how organizations should deal with Big Data, Blockchain and AI and he is a faculty member of the Blockchain Research Institute.

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From purchasing transactions, to chatter from social networks, to web server logs, to satellite imagery, to traffic flow sensors, it's estimated that we now create--every two days --as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. What's more, it's expected that the amount of data currently available will double every two years world­wide as virtually everything becomes digitized.

The insights provided by Big Data--the massive volume of information too complex and dynamic to be able to process, store, analyze, and man­age with traditional data tools--enable organizations to make better decisions, improve efficiency, decrease costs, and increase revenue. Yet many companies don't even realize its benefits...and if they do, may still not know how to take advantage of it.

Sharing best practices from companies that have implemented a Big Data strategy including Walmart, InterContinental Hotel Group, Walt Disney, and Shell, Think Bigger reveals how to harness the power of Big Data for your organization. Filled with practical guidance, the book shows you how to:

* Foster an information-centric culture, and enable your employees to develop new operational, tactical, and strategic plans based on real data instead of calculated estimates.

* Know what products to digitize, and how best to utilize public data marketplaces containing already-collected information that could benefit your organization.

* Determine the best way to analyze the data you have using open source tools, analyses, and technologies like Hadoop and MapReduce.

* Establish clear guidelines for respecting your customers' privacy.

* Put the right security measures and procedures in place to protect your organization's and your customers' data, including a crisis plan in the event that you get hacked.

Think Bigger examines Big Data's impact on specific industries, as well as the use of mobile and real-time data. The book takes a clear-eyed look at the growing use of sensor-enabled devices, and the rise of the "quantified self," as more and more consumers use technology to track everything from how much they eat to how many calories they burn. You'll discover how to use gamification tactics such as check-ins, badges, and loyalty programs to generate vast amounts of data in a user-friendly and engaging environment.

Big Data has already begun changing the way business, and even society, is operated. Think Bigger is an essential resource for ensuring that your company isn't left in the dust.

Mark van Rijmenam is Co-founder and CEO of Datafloq. Datafloq is the One-Stop Shop for Big Data, creating the Big Data ecosystem by connecting all stakeholders within the global Big Data market. He is an entrepreneur, a well thought after international public speaker and a Big Data strategist. He gives advice to major organization on how to develop and implement a Big Data strategy. He is co-founder of 'Data Donderdag' a bi-monthly (networking) event in The Netherlands on Big Data to help organizations better understand Big Data.

Connect with Mark van Rijmenam:

linkedin/in/markvanrijmenam

twitter: @VanRijmenam

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1

Of all the data in recorded human history, 90 percent has been

created in the last two years. However, the need to use and interpret

such Big Data has been around for much longer. In fact,

the earliest examples of using data to track and control businesses date

back 7,000 years, when Mesopotamians used rudimentary accounting

to record the growth of crops and herds. Accounting principles

continued to improve, and in 1663, John Graunt recorded and examined

all information about mortality rolls in London. He wanted to

gain an understanding of and build a warning system for the ongoing

bubonic plague. In the first recorded example of statistical data analysis,

he gathered his findings in the book Natural and Political Observations

Made upon the Bills of Mortality, which provides great insights

into the causes of death in the seventeenth century. Because of his work,

Graunt can be considered the father of statistics.

The nineteenth century witnessed the start of the information age.

Modern data was first gathered in 1887, when Herman Hollerith invented

a computing machine that could read holes punched into paper

cards to organize census data.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In 1937, during Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, the United States

created the first major data project to keep track of contributions by

more than three million employers and 26 million employees under

the new Social Security Act. IBM was awarded the contract to develop

a punch card-reading machine for this immense bookkeeping task.

The British developed the first data-processing machine in 1943

to decipher Nazi codes during World War II. The device, named Colossus,

searched for patterns in intercepted messages at a rate of 5,000

characters per second. This reduced the time required to perform the

task from weeks to merely hours. It was a huge step forward.

In 1952 the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was created

and, within 10 years, it had contracts with more than 12,000 cryptologists.

They were confronted with information overload during

the Cold War, as they started collecting and processing intelligence

signals automatically.

In 1965, the U.S. Government decided to build the first data center

to store its more than 742 million tax returns and 175 million sets

of fingerprints. Employees transferred all those records onto magnetic

computer tape that was stored in a single location. The project

was later dropped out of fear of “Big Brother,” but it represented the

beginning of the electronic data storage era.

Then, in 1989, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed

what eventually became the World Wide Web. He wanted to

facilitate the sharing of information through a “hypertext” system.

Little could he know at that moment the impact his invention would

have on everyone.

Beginning in the 1990s, data was created at an amazing rate as

more and more devices were connected to the Internet. In 1995, the

first supercomputer was built; it performed as much work in a second

than a calculator operated by a single person could do in 30,000

years.

THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

In 2005, Roger Mougalas of O’Reilly Media coined the term “Big

Data,” a year after the company created the term Web 2.0. He used

the term to refer to a large set of data that is almost impossible to

manage and process using traditional business intelligence tools.

In that same year, Yahoo! created Hadoop on top of Google’s

MapReduce. Its goal was to index the entire World Wide Web;

nowadays, many organizations around the world use the open-source

Hadoop to crunch massive data sets.

As more and more social network sites appeared and Web 2.0 took

flight, more and more data was created daily. Innovative startups slowly

mined this vast amount of data and governments also began Big Data

projects. In 2009, the Indian government decided to take an iris scan,

fingerprint, and photograph of all of its 1.2 billion inhabitants. All

this data is stored in the largest biometric database in the world.

By 2010, when Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google,

spoke at the Techonomy forum in Lake Tahoe, California, he put

the information revolution in perspective by stating that “every two

days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of

civilization up until 2003. . . . That’s something like five exabytes of

data. . . .”

In 2011 the well-received McKinsey report on “Big Data: The Next

Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity,” concluded

that by 2018, the United States would face a shortage of 140,000 to

190,000 data scientists, as well as 1.5 million data managers. The

job Big Data Scientist is therefore often coined the sexiest job of the

twenty-first century.

In the past few years, there has been a massive increase in the

number of Big Data startup companies. All are trying to help organizations

manage and understand this explosion of Big Data. As more