The next case study about using analytics to perform better is about a racing team. I’d like to ask all of you what does winning the race mean to you. This racing team is literally using data to win races. They are taking in over 30,000 bits of information per second during a formula one race. They have the guys in the pit looking at the information and can know exactly when a driver needs to stop at the pit to change the tire up to the sub second, and they can do all preventative maintenance at that moment.
The driver receives real time information to better perform and win the race and knows exactly what their competitors are doing. He knows exactly when they’re breaking, exactly when they’re pushing the gas and what he needs to do to win that race. What is most interesting about this is not the fact that they’re using data to win the race, not the fact that they’re doing preventative maintenance, but the fact that they are then using this information to improve the quality of the car’s features, so they can minimize pit time and improve the driver’s performance in the future.
So this is taking data and becoming a Big Data company. They could -- they are literally, this is their differentiation to win that race. And the last point that I like to hone in on although I have so many I want to share and that are so profound I love to share something like this and I had so many around this but how do you actually change the world and change healthcare you know in the future.
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So this is taking data and becoming a Big Data company. They could -- they are literally, this is their differentiation to win that race. And the last point that I like to hone in on although I have so many I want to share and that are so profound I love to share something like this and I had so many around this but how do you actually change the world and change healthcare you know in the future.
Here’s a case study in higher education. This university is using big data, and they’re using it from all different sources, to bring information in genomics information in about individual’s gene make up in order to better treat cancer patients. They have data coming in from all over. They need real-time information. They are able to perform many different calculations.
This is more of the complex example of Big Data analytics where they had to figure out if they could detect something different because of your gene makeup. Will that help you to have a better outcome in your treatments? So this will change the world, and this will hopefully help towards curing cancer. These are just examples of what you can do in your business, and it could be one organization in your business, but it can have a profound impact, and that’s what I like to think about when it comes to Big Data. How can you make that profound impact?
So what are the real challenges that we see today when it comes to Big Data analytics implementations? This is no surprise to all of you because you’re probably faced with these challenges. You are faced with the fact that you have so much data, and you have so many data sources that most of your day is probably going towards how do you maximize the data that you have and how do you manage it.
The other issue have is that people have higher expectations than they have ever had before. You have aligned with the business. You’re going out and purchasing data marts and data tools that are completely separate from your data strategy as an IT organization. You’ve got everything separate, so you don’t really have a single way of bringing data and people together that is a long-lasting and a more strategic way of managing the needs of the people and the amount of data that there is.
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The other issue that I wanted to mention is that you are focused on a single version of truth, but that is not realistic in today’s world. We used to be so focused on the meta-data layer and the semantic layer and how do you get that single version of the truth, but the reality is there is too many data sources. There are too many expectations. There are too many individual data marts going on in your lines of business.
You have to give that expectation up and start thinking about how do you bring together more of a network of truth. How do you have a control shift, and how you manage and consume and improve data over time. And the best way to describe this to me is the analogy of the encyclopedia. If you think about, for those of you old enough to remember them, that used to be the one place you went to get all answers.
If you think about it I know this encyclopedia set on my shelf in our office was there for 10 years, but you still thought that if you went to the encyclopedia that you would get that one version of the truth that always is the fact and that’s what you would believe in when you would move forward.
But now, we would never go to encyclopedia, we would go to the Wikipedia, and the reality is that Wikipedia is constantly changing. It’s much more accurate than the encyclopedia because the day the encyclopedia was published, the next day things are changed. And as fast as things are changing today and as fast as we are getting information at our fingertips and learning new things, we can improve the information we all get in that social experience of Wikipedia, and we can all add to the accuracy that the Wikipedia provides us. And that is the best way to describe what I call the network of truth, the way that all of us need to contribute true information in a way that we can all rely on it. We all can question it. We can all improve it over time.