Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity by McKinsey Consulting. Published in May 2011.
Why invest your time in this article?
Even if you only read the Executive Report (which should take you about 10-15 minutes), McKinsey provides a great framework for understanding how massive datasets have the potential to impact a range of industries including the public sector, retail and manufacturing.
****
Predictive Analytics are quietly and profoundly changing the process of making decisions.
- How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters. Published in the MIT Technology Review in December 2012.
- Data Analytics: Crunching the Future. New analytics technology is predicting behavior—and building businesses. Published in Businessweek in September 2011.
- Several books (Freakonomics, Super Crunchers and Moneyball) and one major motion picture (Moneyball) tell the stories of people in medicine, education, sports, government and many fields of business who are using data to trump the traditional experts and make smarter decisions than their competitors.
- Predicting extreme weather weeks in advance. Published in Bloomberg Businessweek in September 2011.
- What Data Can’t Do by David Brooks. Published in the New York Times in February 2013.
Why invest your time in these article, books or movie recommendations?
Data-driven decision making has become far too important to ignore. Period.