More than Big Data, the challenge is Ubiquitous Data

If you’ve watched this blog over the past year and a half, you know we’ve written a great deal about social, mobile, big data, analytics, cloud, Platform as a Service, process, and more recently, the Internet of Things. While these topics seem to cover a wide variety of technologies and business models, they actually cover the periphery of something bigger that sits at the core of all of these concepts.

We’ve named it Ubiquitous Data.

It needed something much broader than just ‘Big Data’ and a way to see through the fog of hype. Fast or slow, large or small, similar or varied, this is more than can fit inside the description of data as ‘big’.

Ubiquitous data is our way to describe the fact that in fifty years we’ve moved from an analog society of paper and telephone to a place where we’re rapidly converting our entire world into a digital landscape. There were some holdouts in some industries like healthcare and government, but the barriers are finally coming down everywhere there is an infrastructure to support it.

The infrastructure needs to continue to support our ideas and conversations as it does now, but it will expand to find and make sense of everything physical, like location, direction, temperature, acceleration, destruction/lack of presence, contact, pressure, gestures, pain, proximity, texture, odor, and sound. Technology exists today to read these physical aspects of our lives but taking instantaneous feeds and doing something with Ubiquitous Data, now that’s the fun of it.

Sensors, B2B applications, SaaS suites, apps, the Web, logs, even humans feed the organization’s machine. The machine in turn feeds automation and human decision making. The cycles become shorter and the decisions better. Done well, we can eliminate the wasteful overages and painful shortfalls that plague not just commerce, but our food and energy supply as well. We will interact much more optimally with our physical world.

The predictable next phase is for technology infrastructure to rapidly improve to meet demand and for everything to move quickly to the developing world, where it can do more to better the human condition than in our developed world.

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Christopher Taylor