Discussion:  The world is flooded with information, making the ability to harness this “big data” and use it to produce meaningful information, incalculable.  Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, believes that his company is positioned to see 10% growth and expansion in the changing competitive environment by creating software that helps to “enable faster, better decision making by improving analysis of vast and growing amounts of data.”  SAS is also trying to capture and quantify data from social media sites in order to produce meaningful information for subscribers.  Ensnaring data from social media sites could become a trend, and one of the biggest unharnessed information sources out there.

Source:  CNN Money

Date:  July 15, 2011

Link:  http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/15/why-big-data-is-suddenly-sexy/

Questions for Discussion:

• Tablets and mobile BI (Business Intellegence) applications are making it easier for people to input data, and greatly increasing the volume of information available.  If you do not have a way to organize this data in a meaningful way, is it still a good thing.  Is there such a thing as too much data?
• In his interview, Jim Goodnight noted that his company’s medical costs keep going up.  What is causing these pervasive “runaway medical costs”?
• Besides social media sites, what is another untapped source of raw data?