With the current big data trend occurring in organizations at all levels, the mistake of trying to collect every big of data available to the organization is made. But as InformationWeek reported, this "record-it-all approach" wastes both resources and money.
The smarter approach is to determine in advance the data that's essential to your agency or organization's operation, "and then take the necessary steps to collect, process, filter and analyze it," according to Joel Young, senior VP of research and development and CTO of Digi International, a machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions provider.
Young told InformationWeek that companies are often overwhelmed by big data, particularly if they haven't figured out how they want to use it -- and the same can be said for agencies in the public sector.
And that's a problem not worth having, given that only 3 percent of data today is tagged, and a mere 0.5 percent is analyzed, according to a new study by research firm IDC. And every two years between now and 2020, the volume of big data will nearly double, reaching 40,000 exabytes, or 40 trillion gigabytes, in just 7 years, IDC predicts.
So to avoid having too much data, you've got to ask yourself some basic questions: "What problem are you trying to solve? You've got all this data, what do you want to do?" Young asked rhetorically. "A lot of times there's a whole lot of data you may not even need."
Once the business problem that an agency wants to solve has been identified, the agency can then decide which data it truly needs and establish rules for gathering that data. "One of the biggest problems I've found with big data is that people record way, way more than they need to," Young told InformationWeek.
Image from Shutterstock
