The buzz of the day: BIG DATA

Big data is hot. No wonder, companies which are successfully exploring Big data perform 5 to 6 percent better than their competitors, according to figures from McKinsey. A good reason for the World Trade Center Amsterdam Business Club to organize the last session of the year on this topic.

Big data, what can you do with it? To put it even stronger, should you do something with it? YES! That’s at least what all 4 key note speakers said during the inspiring and informative session.

“If you do nothing with it, your company might be dead in 5 years time. Start writing a Post-Mortum in order to realize how your business can be disrupted”, according Sietze Dijkstra, owner of Harvest Moon.

And Dijkstra should know. As a former General Manager of IBM Global Business Services, he led the Smarter Cities growth initiative. “Those who make it are the entrepreneurs who” Think Big, Act Small and Scale fast ‘ and who make use of the latest technologies. In the Netherlands, however, we tend to think too small and conservative. Promising start-up’s then disappear almost all to America. ”

The new oil
With Big Data, an innovative industry is being created. In addition to the data analyst, the role of a data scientist has been introduced. This person not only analyses the data, but also experiments and creates new services. The Chief Data Officer (CDO) in charge is responsible for the new resources, the new ‘oil’ of our digitized world. An inspiring example is Usama Fayyaad, the first CDO at Yahoo! who created the largest data science team in the world in 4 years time. By targeting using content management, this team multiplied the adversting revenues of Yahoo! by a factor of 20.