4 years later after our “Big Data @ Work” HBR book review, is the topic still actual? I recently re-read Thomas Davenport’s Big Data book – and it is more actual than ever.
There are several reasons why “Big Data at Work” became more topical as time went on:
– big data transformed fundamentally using simpler tools – most notably machine learning;
– the concept of big data and data scientists as business partner was widely adopted by most companies;
– some of the pitfalls materialized too – e.g. Hadoop was slowly substituted by cloud services (which combine analytics – Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Red became dominant players);
– big data started to deliver tangible consumer benefits – see Amazon’s Echo, Siri and all assistants, as well as automated processes used in financial services, healthcare or customer services.
These are just a few reasons to revisit the book.