“Big Data” Isn’t that "Big"

“Big Data” Isn’t Big

"Big Data" is now the most hot topic and most buzz word in industry. People are bragging about Big data like the fishermen brag about the size of their fish. The boast about the access to endless terabytes of information. They claim deep insights about everything from the performance of employees to the preferences of their customer base. But marketing materials, like fishermen, exaggerate. Most companies only have a fraction of the pure data they claim. And typically, only a small fraction of that fraction is useful for generating any non-trivial insight. Raw Data contains humongous amount of noise and errors. For that most of the Big Data is not useful and the useful data is not that "Big". 

Then Why companies brag about their "Data" ??

According to Tech Crunch Because they want to feel like one of the big dogs. They’ve heard about the enormous reserves of data collected by the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Google. And even though they don’t have the reach to collect that much data — or the money to buy it — they want to feel (and have outsiders think) they are in on the trend. As data analyst Cathy O’Neil noted in a recent blog post, many believe that “when you take a normal tech company and sprinkle on data, you get the next Google.” But even big companies only use a tiny fraction of the data they collect.