“We are currently witnessing a land rush of investment in Big Data architectures promising companies that they can turn their data into gold using the latest in distributed computing and advanced analytical methods. Although there is indeed much potential in applying machine learning and statistical analysis to largedatasets, many companies are hardly sitting on the kind of data that will allow them to compete using hundreds of machines chugging through terabytes of data.
But that’s okay. There is a massive benefit to just getting an organization to understand what data they do have and how they can deploy intelligent models on this data to disrupt their current approaches to doing business. This does not require the latest in parallel computing or bursting into new map-reduce paradigms just to derive insight. It does not require huge data warehouses or terabytes of unstructured data. What it does require is good science on good data. This is where organizations need to start; becoming ”data aware’ and building an organizational culture that understands data as a real asset.” Sean McClure ( November 3, 2014 )