Let's Just Embrace the Term "Big Data" and Move On

Over the past few months, every time I've had a conversation in which the phrase "Big Data" is used, the speaker inevitably does the whole air quotes thing and immediately apologizes for using the term. It's easy to understand why. Like "cloud computing" and "service oriented architecture", it's one of those terms that got co-opted by the marketing department and slapped upon anything vaguely related to its original meaning. If you're at all interested in the underlying technology and its potential value, uttering the phrase "Big Data" makes you feel like you're selling snake oil.

But, snake oil, it turns out, was really effective at treating arthritis and bursitis. Big Data technologies won't cure every or even most of an organization's data problems, but they are really good for a lot of legitimate things. And, we really do need an umbrella term that can sum up in two words a whole set of complex concepts, like processing large volumes of data, handling unstructured data, real-time stream-based analytics, focusing on correlation rather than causality, tolerating messy data, new types of data stores and highly-scalable parallel processing techniques.

For a while, I tried to come up with a new label to apply to this bucket of technologies, approaches, and techniques--"Advanced Data Management," "21st Century Analytics," things like that. And, everytime I trotted out one of my neologisms in conversation, I had to immediately back up and explain what I meant, and eventually I would end up saying, "You know, 'Big Data'."

So, let's take the term back from the snake oil salesmen and embrace Big Data. It's a perfectly useful phrase, and it will save us an awful lot of time pausing and apologizing and explaining what we mean.