Big Data

I came across an article on BBC.com this morning http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17682304 that redirected my entire morning. In it Dr. Mike Lynch⁽¹⁾ stated:

“Today, thanks to technology's mass appeal and accessibility, on a daily basis we collectively produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and the growth rate is so high that 90% of all information ever created was produced in the last two years alone. The value of this information to organisations who want to keep ahead of the curve is huge.”

Here is the part that stopped me cold: “…90% of all information ever created was produced in the last two years alone.”  Emphasis is mine.

“…90% of all information ever created was produced in the last two years alone.” Where in the world did that statement come from? So I went word searching

The first thing I found  was an unattributed promotional piece on IBM’s site http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/ excerpted below. (Please note that the noun “information” is “data” here. And IBM can help you with your “big data.”): 

“What is big data?

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data. “

Next up was http://bigdatalowlatency.com/ which lead to another IBM quote: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/global/files/us__en_us__smarter_computing__ibm_data_final.pdf  Here again the noun in use is “data” not “information. (And IBM can still help you with your big data.)

 

I found a few more references to that IBM 90% data statement which I won't bore you with. Nowhere else did I find the word “information” used.  If Dr. Lynch had used the word “data” instead of “information” I would never have run along this tangent as there is a big difference in my mind between data and information.

Dr. Lynch has shown us that just because you have data doesn’t mean you have information.

⁽¹⁾ Dr. Mike Lynch OBE is founder and chief executive (CEO) of Autonomy, and executive vice-president (EVP) of HP Information Management. Autonomy, part of HP since October 2011, makes software that processes human information, or unstructured data, including social media, email, video, audio, text and web pages. From BBC.com