Forbes: The Age of Big Data / A Looming Talent Gap For Data Scientists / Why Companies Are Spending More on Analytics

The Age of Big Data: “…Big Data has the potential to utterly transform the relationship that individuals have with institutions, customers with companies, patients with the healthcare system, students with universities, and voters with government. And that means once it has fully penetrated society and industry, the Big Data revolution may very well prove a turning point in our economic – and ultimately, cultural – history as great as the electronics revolution. . . perhaps even as great as the first and second Industrial Revolutions.”
–“Why? Because once the relationship of individuals to institutions transforms, the benefits to the individual consumer, citizen, patient and student will be profound.” (Forbes) http://goo.gl/kxAlq
 
How a Looming Talent Gap Will Crush Enterprise Hopes for Big Data: “’A lot of companies don’t know how to find data scientists, and don’t understand data science,’ … ‘These enterprise companies can’t implement a proper data analytical solution because they have no data talent.'”
— “Part of the problem is an overall lack of big data skills in the United States. In May 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute laid out the numbers: ‘By 2018, the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions.’” (ReadWriteWeb) http://goo.gl/SQqyS
 
Big Data Security Is Inevitable: “There’s been a fair amount of discussion about the fact that security analytics is becoming a big data problem. … If you think that enterprises recognize these trends, boning up on Hadoop, Cassandra, and NoSQL, and hiring data scientists to tag along with security analysts, think again.  There’s a growing security skills shortage that will preclude these activities before they even start.” (Network Worlds) http://goo.gl/tME2c
 
Big Data Holds Big Promise for Government: “Big data has the potential to transform the work of government agencies, unlocking advancements in efficiency, the speed and accuracy of decisions and the capability to forecast, according to a separate report from MeriTalk.”
–“…the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) at University College London is combining data from London’s Oyster cards – used to pay for public transport – and Twitter messages. Tube-travel patterns are regular: people who enter the system at one station tend to leave it at a particular other one. Twitter messages reveal a city’s structure and its activity.” (Smart Data Collective) http://goo.gl/aqokm
 
Why are companies spending more on analytics despite cutbacks elsewhere? “Analyst Dan Vesset, author of IDC’s “Worldwide Business Analytics Software” report, credits ‘attention-grabbing headlines’ about big data, rather than the data stockpiles themselves, with helping to put business analytics on the agenda of senior executives. Goodnight seems equally dubious, saying big data is the hot new topic ‘because people got tired of talking about the cloud.'” (InformationWeek) http://goo.gl/feQ2o