10 Top Big Data Stories of 2014

In 2014, businesses stopped just taking about big data and got serious about big data deployments, moving many of their initiatives from test environments to production. The phenomenon is shaking up business structures, causing roles to shift and evolve and seemingly birthing new use cases with every passing day. Here are CIO.com’s most-read big data stories of 2014.

10) Why Analytics Makes Tesla Better Than Jaguar, by Rob Enderle, published Aug. 8, 2014

The Tesla isn’t a perfect car, especially in a market still dominated by gas guzzlers. But the company’s widespread use of analytics to study its vehicles improves the customer experience and offers a lesson to automobile industry mainstays still resting on their laurels.

9) C-Level Executives Seeing Big Results From Big Data, by Thor Olavsrud, published Sept. 11, 2014

A study by Accenture finds that many organizations are putting big data initiatives into production and the vast majority of those that do are pleased with the results.

8) Data Scientist Role Shifting to Focus on Developers, by Thor Olavsrud, published Aug. 4, 2014

Anant Jhingran, one of the luminaries that helped develop IBM’s Watson, says that as big data becomes more mainstream, data scientists must begin to think of their role as enabling developers to deliver business value to end users in the lines of business.

7) Big Data Helps Walgreens Treat Walk-in Patients, by Mary K. Pratt, published Jan. 29, 2014

Cloud-based electronic medical records and analytics systems give Walgreens health data to diagnose and treat patients at in-store clinics.

6) Businesses Spending on Big Data Marketing but Not Hiring for It, by Thor Olavsrud, published Jan. 30, 2014

Marketing organizations are continuing to increase their budgets for big data marketing initiatives, but more are focusing on technology, not talent. That could be a costly mistake.

5) Data Scientists Frustrated by Data Variety, Find Hadoop Limiting, by Thor Olavsrud, published July 2, 2014

A survey of data scientists finds that a majority of them believe their work has grown more difficult as a result of the rapidly increasing variety of data sources they need to draw upon, and nearly a quarter feel Hadoop is not suited to the analytics they need to perform.

4) IBM Looks to Outsmart Big Data Competition with Watson, by Thor Olavsrud, published Jan. 14, 2014

IBM is seeking to jump ahead of the big data technology competition by moving its Watson cognitive supercomputer to the cloud and offering up its capabilities as a set of big data services and a big data application development platform.

3) Is 2014 the Year of the ‘Big Data Stack’?, by Thor Olavsrud, published Jan. 9, 2014

There is a dizzying array of big data reference architectures available today. 2014 may be the year we see a big data stack — similar to the LAMP stack that drove development of dynamic and interactive websites in the dotcom era — begin to coalesce.

2) 8 Ways Big Data and Analytics Will Change Sports, byLauren Brousell, published March 13, 2014

The leading minds in sports convened in Boston in March at the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to share ideas about how big data will be a game-changer for fans, players, coaches, officials and front-office personnel.

1) The CIO and CMO Perspective on Big Data, by Stephanie Overby, published Aug. 5, 2014

CMOs now command more of the tech budget than any other executive outside of the CIO. With big data being one of the main drivers of technology spending, a strong relationship between IT and marketing is critical to business success.

Source: CIO