Data analytics expert says the key to success is making sense of more data faster than your competitor

  • Published
  • By Elizabeth Long
  • 711th Human Performance Wing
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio --  An expert in data analytics says for businesses, organizations and the military to be successful, they need to be able to not only process and make sense of the ever-growing amount of data that is coming in at a blistering pace, they need to do it faster than their competitors.

Jeff Jonas, the chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics Group and an IBM Distinguished Engineer, recently visited Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to discuss the issue with Air Force Research Laboratory, 711th Human Performance Wing scientists, engineers and other participants at a recent seminar.

Jonas says as large collections of data come together, some very exciting and somewhat unexpected things happen. "I think about data like puzzle pieces," Jonas said. "There is a big difference between a giant pile of puzzle pieces and a puzzle that has been put together. When you see how the pieces relate to the other pieces, you have a better understanding of the overall picture."

Like puzzles and puzzle pieces, Jonas explained that there is a big difference between a big pile of data and data in context. "An organization is only as smart as the observations it has and the data is has collected," he said.

According to Jonas, when you add the "space-time-travel" data about how people move that is being created by billions of mobile devices, what becomes computable is outright amazing. Jonas thinks of geospatial data as analytic super-food.

"I spend a lot of time consulting with the privacy community," he said, "and the question is, with all this instrumentation, do consumers know what is happening to them with all this data that is being transmitted about them? Do they have a choice of opting in our out? After all, it is their data."

As for the military, Jonas said that it must figure out how to be more efficient or it risks being overrun by adversaries that are more efficient. "If your adversary figures out how to spend one-hundredth of the money to be ten times more effective, that should be of great concern to all of us," he cautioned.

Jonas said organizations must constantly work to make sense of what is observable so they can maintain a competitive edge. "In 2007 Goldman Sachs (a global investment banking and securities firm) estimated that every millisecond it gained in its analytics was worth $100 million per year," he said. "Every millisecond!"

Jonas imagines what possibilities exist if organizations could harness more data at a faster rate. "It is essential that organizations do this," he said, "because I think there is going to be a lot less tolerance for discovering things after the fact that were obvious way earlier than when they were found." And Jonas wants to inspire technology and process professionals to think about privacy and civil liberties protections when building new technology, something some call Privacy by Design.