

Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity - Grovara123
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technology_and_innovation/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation

======
mbesto
Ugh, I'm getting really frustrated with HN. Nowhere in the article does it
mention anything about "Starting a Company". The message is clearly directed
at big businesses.

Please fix the title appropriately.

/frustrated

------
junto
It goes something like this:

Some manager sees a problem at work and mentions it to his golfing "buddy" at
the 19th hole, who is a consulting senior partner at some management
consulting company.

A week later he gets a call from his golfing buddy inviting him to discuss
those problems over lunch. A proposal is made and the manager then contracts
the management consulting company to do an "investigative study".

Consultant(s) are flown in from various distant places and disrupt the
business with lots of inane questions for two weeks. Managing partner appears
onsite on the first day and last day (if you are lucky). The junior management
consultant is then tasked to write up a report, that the senior manager puts
his name to.

The invoice arrives for 1 million dollars. Report doesn't get read by the
business and nothing changes. Management consultancy blames business for
ignoring advice.

Cycle goes on. Golf gets played. Drinks at the bar, manager spills his guts
about problems at work to his management consultant golf buddies, who are just
a little less drunk than he is. Expenses accounts get charged.

The long con....

N.B. You will notice that the management consultancy expense account is
charged when reeling in the client at the golf club bar, whilst the expense
account of the "mark" starts to be charged when the ink on the contract is
still wet.

------
iridium
Why all the hate for "Big Data"? Other than that it is a shiny MBA term that
cannot, _god forbid_ be part of hacker terminology.

Lets focus on the Enterprise tools sector, since this is a large, rich market
that is yet to be tapped properly. Imagine every single piece of data from
customer contact points to orders to cases to actual product usage. Imagine
being able to use a tool that can take all this data and show it in pretty
graphs that you can use to decide how many millions to spend where. We dont
have these tools today. Oracle's BI is bloated, and there honestly are not
that many tools out there that can process large amounts of data while
integrating successfully with a thousand different other tools that generate
this data. Every single system now tracks data..but it goes nowhere, just a
large tape to be stored away into eternity while the decision makers are still
struggling with massive excel sheets.

Custom solutions become obsolete as soon as one of the other systems get
upgraded, so this is a great opportunity for a cloud or packaged software. And
for those of you who dont want to work in backend data processing, understand
that the biggest component of Big Data is the UI - The data needs to be
presented in the most useful manner possible.

------
prtamil
So that mckinsey can Steal more money by sending those BigData Expert MBAs.

------
npguy
This is a classic case of an industry that has grown before the tools. Who
would have thought we will be carrying supercomps in our pockets to generate
so much data?

------
batista
Translation: adopting the marketing/business fad of the day is important for
your company even if it has no relation to your business whatsoever.

