Big Data Turns Labor Information Into Gold

Today, manufacturers are surrounded by the buzz about big data — as well as by the flood of information it represents. Why should they care? The answer is that a big data strategy creates opportunities to transform existing information about their workforce into business value. With the right data collection, analysis, and action, manufacturers can turn everyday data “straw” into information “gold.”

As with many buzzwords, “big data” seemed to appear out of nowhere.

As fast as you can say “exabyte,” it’s become part of our business vocabulary. In April 2010, after some initial resistance, big data became an accepted term on Wikipedia. big data now shows up everywhere — from the tech blogosphere to the plans of CEOs to the pages of The New York Times. Over the last couple of years, the exponential growth of information (and the tools to handle it) has made big data part of everyday discourse.

Buzzword status aside, what big data describes is real and growing at a furious rate. Each day, according to an oft-quoted IBM statistic, we create more than 2 exabytes of data — that’s 2-followed-by-18-zeros bytes. As a result, 90 percent of the data in the world has been created in the last two years alone.