Dion Hitchcliffe makes some useful points in his post, The enterprise opportunity of Big Data: Closing the "clue gap." After a comprehensive look at the possible architectures to effectively look at big data to mine insights, Dion notes that this capability needs to be put into the hands of as many workers as possible. He writes, “The organizations that figure out this part will reap corresponding rewards. In order to have enough impact, Big Data capabilities must be as easy to use as Google search.”
Dion goes on to add, “To close the “clue gap”, wise organizations will seek to get out of the Big Data shallows with all three aspects of Big Data while simultaneously delivering capabilities usable and within reach of every worker. If Big Data requires a new set of high priests (i.e. extensively trained experts) to use, it will become a niche story.” I could not agree more with all of these points.
Big data can be a broad net of concepts but one aspect of it is social media. Dion covers this connection in a related post, How social media and big data will unleash what we know. He begins this post with the observation, “Today social media generates more information in a short period of time than was previously available in the entire world a few generations ago. Making sense of it and understanding what it means for your business will require all new technologies and techniques, including the emerging field of big data.”
Dion goes on to note, “that the key to social media interactions between people is that it leaves knowledge behind for others to find and reuse.” This was one of the first things that attracted me to the use of social media within the enterprise (for example see An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department). Of course, I also see this value on the Web.
So one of the potential benefits of social media with the enterprise is the ability to listen to the “voice of the employee” to use the term I learned from Forrester’s Leslie Owens, and on the Web to listen to the voice of the customer. To be really effective we need to put the listening devices in the hands of as many as possible and not have the need for the business user to be dependent on “listening experts” or as Dion said a “new set of high priests.”
The tool that allows you to uncover useful content within massive volumes of information needs to be simple and accessible. This is the goal of the Darwin Awareness Engine™. Our mission statement is “to display the world’s information patterns to improve awareness.” The interface is intentionally simple and all activity occurs on a single page. Here is how the Awareness Engine works. It allows you to discover what is going on in real time.
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