Here’s why I will personally retire the words “Big Data”

OK, that’s it. On April 1, 2014, I will cease using the term, “Big Data.”

This isn’t because I’m finished working with organizations that need to solve big challenges through the use of enormous amounts of data. It isn’t because I think Big Data is more hype than reality, either. To the contrary, I think the digitization of our world will accelerate and that all of that information will affect our lives more than we can realize today. Big Data is going to get bigger, faster, hairier and be used to describe facets of our world that we never considered to be data before now. We’ll have an ability to make real-time decisions on things that we haven’t yet considered.

Organizations that can’t manage fast-moving data that describes far more than just transactions are going to struggle mightily against competitors who are right now building faster and more flexible infrastructures. The computerized world of yesterday, mostly still in place today, was built for transactions and now needs to be rebuilt for any kind of meaningful information, coming from any source, and used for any purpose.

Retiring “Big Data”

I’m going to personally retire the phrase partly because I’ve come to realize that Big Data was once a great way to describe something that needed definition (thank you, Doug Laney of Gartner). For the uninitiated, there had to be a way to say, “This is really different from anything that came before and will have an enormous impact.” The second reason is that we’re past the point of a simple description and I’m starting to believe the term is getting in the way more than it is helping to clarify what’s really happening.

What’s really happening? We’re past the shock and awe phase of what Big Data can do. We’re past the, “Imagine a world…” point and rolling up our sleeves. Big Data isn’t a debate and we’re no longer forming the battle lines — the data analytics revolution is here and being fought every day. Need evidence? ”Revolution” was the term used in this week’s McKinsey report that never even mentions “Big Data” until halfway through, and then only once. That’s because the bigness of data isn’t the issue. The issue is our ability to analyze digitized information in the moments that matter to affect the outcome of the things we care about. That’s the trend and that’s the best way to describe it. Need a catchier term? Fast data. Really, really, really fast data.

So, why April 1st?

April 1st isn’t an April Fools Day joke. I’ll be hosting a track at the InterOp Conference Workshops in Las Vegas on March 31st to talk about the realities of how data is being used to do remarkable things in several industries. Join us as we usher out the term by talking about solid examples and not about hype. We’ll talk about how real companies are managing enormous data sets to do remarkable things.

If you’re interested in having one last discussion about Big Data, come to Interop in Las Vegas for the Big Data Workshop on March 31st. I’ll be there with great partners that include the CTO of Siemens Healthcare, the Chief Data Scientist for TIBCO, and the VP of Marketing for Alpine Data Labs.

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Christopher Taylor