Recently I’ve become fascinated by the topic of Big Data – essentially how new technologies and techniques are allowing the near-real time analysis of massive volumes of data to uncover useful insights. It is a field that is evolving rapidly, and no doubt is somewhat over-hyped, but story after story tells how new analysis techniques are yielding genuine advantage for the organisations wielding them.

The brilliant thing about Big Data is that it allows organisations to get an additional advantage out of an asset that they already own – one which can be augmented by taking data that is freely available, such as from Web traffic and data logs, to deliver new insights.

I’ll be posting a lot more on Big Data this year, but if you want to get a sense of what’s possible, check out this article I recently wrote for BRWk.