Making sense of Brontobytes.

• Author: Sitton, Judy Vasek
• Position: Think Bigger: Developing a Successful Big Data Strategy for Your Business - Book review

Think Bigger: Developing a Successful Big Data Strategy for Your Business

Author: Mark Van Rijmenam

Publisher: AMACOM Books

Publication Date: 2014

Length: 288 pages

Price: $27.95

ISBN:978-0-814434-1-54

Source: www.amacombooks.org

Data has to be processed, stored, analyzed, and visualized to have any meaning, according to Think Bigger author Mark Van Rijmenam. But how can that happen when data has become so large that we have outgrown the metric system for naming the size of data stores?

This book takes a step-by-step, understandable approach for understanding data that is "so vast that we are not able to ask the right questions to find the right answers." It explains what big data is, provides examples of how organizations can and have benefitted from it, and offers a big data roadmap for implementing suggested ideas. The book leaves us with a vision of the not-so-distant future when, with the right tools and strategies, big data will be called simply "data" once again.

Useful Features

Assembled in a well-organized and easy-to-follow format, the book contains several valuable features. The seven-page glossary includes technical terms related to analytics, data size, business, and consumers. For example, it says a brontobyte, "the size of the digital universe tomorrow," equates to 1,000 yottabytes (1 quadrillion gigabytes). Notes for every chapter show a significant amount of research. Key points are re-emphasized in "takeaways" at the end of each chapter. Case studies interspersed throughout are short, specific, and used to illustrate points such as how big data is used to enhance security.

One large chapter devoted to big data by industry includes agriculture, automotive, education, energy, financial services, gaming, health care, legal, manufacturing, not-for-profit, media and entertainment, oil and gas, public sector, retail, telecom, transportation, and travel and leisure. Taking a "With big data, almost anything is possible" stance, the author suggests that many more industries could benefit by using big data creatively.

The author also provides advice for small and medium-sized enterprises. He identifies opportunities for leveraging smaller volumes of data to bring about big...