As a member of the local IT industry, I have been witness to many astounding technological advancements this past decade. One technology that I have heard so much about is Big Data.
Big Data is called Big Data because there is so much of it, thanks to the velocity at which it is being generated and the variety of it. Part of reason it is able to do this, is with all the millions of sensors out there collecting data about quite a number of things.
One of the more popular examples I’ve heard about Big Data, is the hundreds if not thousands of sensors on a plane, that can tell its manufacturers just about anything that they might wish to know.
And I might not have the best grasp of Big Data technologies, but doesn’t the recent MH370 incident exhibit circumstances where it could be used to save lives or at least put worried families at ease?
With all the marvelous things that it is claimed to be able to do, why did we only find out the plane had deviated from its intended course, five days after the fact, wasting not only five days but also billions of dollars worth of resources that had gone into looking for the plane at somewhere it never was.
With all the insights, that I have heard Big Data makes possible, why were persons with stolen passports ever allowed to board the plane?
All news reports highlight different possible suspects almost on a daily basis, from co-pilot to senior pilot to crew members to one of the passengers, without any real concrete evidence to back it up – with all the analysis and correlation processing power that Big Data technologies can provide, are we getting any closer to narrowing down who are the perpetrators involved, other possible players on the ground, their main motive, overall intent and end goal?
It is well over a week since MH370 disappeared without a trace. What is disturbing is that with all the technologies we have at our disposal, we don’t seem to be any closer to finding where it might be.
IT BYTES BACK! says: We are living in times where Big Data and analytics benefits are being spouted about left, right and centre. And yet, sadly at a time when it could offer answers to so many questions, it hadn’t been leveraged.
