“Big data” is one of the buzzwords of today’s corporate world. A growing number of companies are storing massive quantities of data hoping it will serve them well at some point down the line. As data specialists Frenk Ochse and Hugo Koopmans explain, businesses that are ready for the next step can develop completely new business models using state-of-the-art data analytics techniques. Yet an obsolete IT infrastructure is keeping many organisations from taking full advantage of big data technology.
We are meeting the two data experts at the offices of Conclusion, of which the full-service IT company Virtual Sciences established by Frenk Ochse, one of our two interviewees, is an independent operating company. Chief Data Scientist Hugo Koopmans is no stranger to these premises either: his agency, DIKW, is a dedicated partner of Conclusion and is regularly contracted to take on datarelated projects for the company. The term “big data” refers primarily to what Ochse and Koopmans have dubbed the “3 Vs”. Koopmans: “We have been storing all sorts of data electronically for the past three decades, but what we do now is different in terms of Volume, Variety and Velocity. In other words: there’s a huge amount of data involved of every conceivable type, which is streamed in real-time. Another difference is that we used to store everything in what is known as a relational database – a collection of data items organised in tables and columns showing plain text and numbers. Nowadays databases are more like giant repositories – data lakes, as you might call them, in which various types of data are stored in raw form. This can be text files, PDFs, emails, videos, audio files or inter-server messages, you name it. We only determine afterwards what criteria we’re going to use in order to make the data ’actionable’ – that’s IT speak for ’usable.’”
