Musing on Big Data example. Not an easy recipe to follow

If a picture is worth a thousand words, as the beaten adage goes, the use of big data, creative analytics and graphics is certainly worth much more. Here is a great example of using Big Bata to explain migration from The Economist.

source: Economist (link)

As with most pictures, what is depicted here is only a small slice of the big frame, the angle the author/analyst wanted to highlight. 

I like this picture for the story that it is trying to tell different audiences in a visually appealing way. A picture like this is sure to resonate with policy makers, corporate executives and even hiring managers and recruiters. If not anything else, it raises questions and follow-up actions from the information depicted.

 

The recipe for big data analytics might look like this:

• Define your analysis goals and audience upfront
• Take a lot of data from different sources
• Filter the data and replicate, but remove redundancies
• Add relevant metadata, tags etc
• Use relevant indexing to navigate the data environment
• Run a lot of filters and queries on it
• Present actionable information
• Turn the information into insights

As is obvious, the recipe or its variances for data analytics are not easy to follow. For one, there is a challenge of defining a problem statement. And then there is the science of gathering data, developing the engine to run the analytics. Then comes the art of visualization while presenting the information.

As one might argue, there is a secret sauce missing in the recipe above!