“Big data will never give you big ideas… Big data doesn’t facilitate big leaps of the imagination. It will never conjure up a PC revolution or any kind of paradigm shift. And while it might tell you what to aim for, it can’t tell you how to get there”–Margaret Heffernan
“Big data is first and foremost the automation of experience. Conventional IT automates processes: you first consider how something might work at its best and then develop a programme that automates precisely this process. With big data, it doesn’t stop there –the process is continually adapted in line with experience”–Donald Kossmann
“Whereas a traditional relational database platform costs $37,000 per terabyte, costs shrink to $5,000 per terabyte when using a database appliance and they shrink further, to $2,000 per terabyte, when using a big data platform such as Hadoop. These cost savings support an order-of-magnitude greater processing capacity that can be applied to data analysis and discovery… We’re in the early stages, but big data is delivering concrete business value to organizations that are putting their toes in the water”—Randy Bean
[Chevron is tapping big-data technologies to transform the audit function, running audit tests on all of its accounts-payable transactions instead of the small sample it used to analyze before.] “This offers a combination of much better quality for notably higher efficiency and lower costs”–Chevron CFO Patricia Yarrington
[“Polls introduce bias. If you’re familiar with the organization presenting the poll, you may give it the answer you think it’s looking for”–Bill Thompson] “The joke on political campaigns is that the same thing will happen with big data”–Pam Baker
