Data, Data Everywhere

"The Economist" had a great article on "Big Data". Plus I've noticed while job searching, "Big Data" is creating jobs.

Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data.

Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

Originally, economic production was based in a factory, where managers labored over machines and processes to make them more efficient. Now statisticians mine the information output of the business for new ideas.

I recently interviewed for a "Big Data" position, but didn't get it. The position intrigued me, because it was not risk management position. Risk management basically is about defining and setting limits. "Big Data" (i.e. data mining, predictive modeling, etc.), on the other hand, is about finding the story behind the data and using the story to enhance the business. It's more proactive.