EP8: The Petabyte Problem - Is More Data Always Better?

There’s an old-school analytics thought that the more data that is analyzed, the more accurate will be the results: the answers, the conclusions, the recommendations. But there’s also the signal to noise ratio issue, which holds that the more irrelevant data that is being examined, the more difficult and time-consuming it is to find those answers. And that brings us to the Petabyte Problem. Today’s companies are collecting exponentially more data than a few years ago. Even worse, much of that data is happening in hidden corners of the company, such as on mobile devices and in the cloud. End result? It can makes analytics far more challenging. Indeed, it can make knowledge management a nightmare. Put simply, companies no longer know what they know—and are therefore condemned to repeatedly and expensively solving the same problems over and over. Michael Stevens is the chief operating officer at AccessData. Michael joins us today to try and figure out a way around the Petabyte Problem.