Search any data related posting and you’ll soon be up to your eyeballs in reports on the promise of the new data era, techniques to help build a better data engine or incorporate new data widgets, and infographics and visualizations showing the kinds of insights you can get with the right mix of techniques.

Got it. Data is big. It’s expected to grow in volume to 35 to 45 zetabytes by 2020. As in seven sets of three zeros big.

It’s also transforming business processes big.…

(A Wake-Up Call to Data Geeks Who Doubt)

by Anne Russell

Anne is the Managing Partner and Founder of World Data Insights, a data consulting company helping customers transform data into information that matters. Anne has spent the last decade immersed in multiple aspects of…

If you’re planning on a data driven approach, you’re going to need data, most likely from a nice mix of sources that will give you the right amount of insight you need to make it worthwhile.



But if you’re not careful, you can quickly spend a lot of money getting it whether it’s “free” or not. Because as much as we’d like it to be, most of it is definitely not free, even if it is on an open and…

So there’s a lot of data out there. Now what?  How is that going to make a difference to you? That depends on what you want it to do, how many resources you have to devote, and how much effort you want to put into maintaining your data driven approach over the long term.  Make no…

At this point, I suspect a lot of us have heard of the three, four, or even seven V’s of big data. The original three V’s – Volume, Velocity, and Variety – appeared in 2001 when Gartner analyst Doug Laney used it to help identify key dimensions of big data.   …

Finding insight within one data stream is a challenge. Finding insight from multiple streams can be significantly more so.  The simple example? Two different databases created independently of each other that claim to capture the same kind of data.  The larger the dataset, the more challenges we face aligning columns, de-duping content, making sure we don’t overwrite newer data with old data, and otherwise cleaning and preparing data for analysis. Ask anyone who has worked trying to align…

I’ve been thinking a lot about data, where it comes from, and what it looks like.  I can’t help it.  I’ve been a data geek for almost 15 years.  And I find data beautiful.  Not necessarily in its raw form, mind you. Then it’s just messy and more often than not a pain to deal with, especially when it gets really, really big.  But when smart, creative people start to clean it up and use it in different ways to find the hidden stories that make sense, it can help us learn things in ways that we…

The United Nations and World Bank are part of a growing globally-oriented Open Data movement.  After World Bank meetings last week in Washington, DC, those involved in defining the international Big Data Revolution asked for inputs.  This is what I posted:

There is no doubt that big data offers significant and exponential potential for international development work across multiple fields.  That this Independent Advisory Group has been formed is clear evidence that the United…