A lot has been said in the last year about Big Data as the “future” of Business Intelligence, but Big Data is a very weird concept to me.

About Big Data

I understand this idea that we’re accumulating more and more data each year, but still Big Data is an elitist concept to me. How many companies in the world have real big data problems? I’m sure large corporations face this type of challenges more often lately, but I think the real revolution in Business Intelligence is hidden somewhere else…

The future of reporting

People are overwhelmed by the amounts of information they receive, and sometimes can be challenging to understand it. This is one of the most creative solutions I have seen in a long time. AT&T created a video bill for cellphone accounts, so when you get your e-bill you also get a link to a personalized video that explains all the items in your bill so you can follow it through at your own pace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Mbkyo_Hz0k

This is not only a very innovative way of presenting information but a clever strategy to lower calls to the company by people trying to get explanations about all the items in their bills. I am not counting on it to replace regular reports, but is a great complement to e-billing strategies.

The future of search

We need tools that help people retrieve all the information they have. Big or small data, there is no storage or analysis challenge that can’t be solved today… by engineers! We need to put the data in the hands of other people: marketing, sales, designers, artists. We engineers already know how to through in a couple of SQL queries and get whatever we need, but is the people (who will NEVER learn SQL or use a simplified query tool) that need to start finding real uses for all the data that we already have.

This is the future of search:

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10200156514653891