Dr. Barry Devlin ( @BarryDevlin ) presented a webinar this morning on ACM Learning Center ( @acmeducation ). This talk titled “The Marriage of BI and Big Data” is based on Barry’s book – Business unIntelligence: Insight and Innovation beyond Analytics and Big Data. Business unIntelligence discusses how the trends in Analytics and Big Data are changing the way People, Process and Information are to be looked at by businesses.
The moment I looked at Dr. Barry’s book, it reminded me of this talk by Reed Hastings. In that talk, Reed made a good point that the data will never impact creative. Businesses need to look at data in a contextual and meaningful way than using it for statistical substantiation when decisions related to creativity are involved.
Business unIntelligence presents ways to look at data differently while extracting meaningful information from Analytics (legacy) and Big Data (emerging) information stores. Concepts of m3 (Modern meaning model) to give meaning and context to data are good takeouts from this book. Giving the right context and appropriate meaning to data, in my opinion, is what Netflix did when it made the House of Cards series. Netflix made a series for a specific set of viewers than making a series for all age groups and viewer segments.
I recommend this book to anyone who is dealing with Business Intelligence and Big Data. Not just to users of these, but also to people who gather, maintain and operate on.