Little Big IT

It’s been interesting watching our daughter’s college talk evolve. As a freshman, there was plenty of “My Big” – as in her big sorority sister. As a sophomore it was more about her “My Little”. Now,  Big and Little seem to be equally used.

We are going through a phase in IT where Big is getting prominence. Lots of Big Data talk. Mark Herring of Software AG recently wrote about its “cousin”, Big Services.

Which is of course leading to debates on Big and Little

Jeff Nolan objected to my describing as Big, Union Pacific’s 20 million temperature readings a day using rail side sensors. He came back  with  Google does over 5 billion text searches, eBay does 1 billion transactions, Twitter, 400 million tweets, Facebook users upload 350 million photos  - PER DAY.

Bruce Rogow, my fellow Gartner alum, raised an interesting point recently. He said we really need Little Data. Specific usable nuggets for the marketing or maintenance or R&D person. Everything else is just process to winnow down the Big Data of their growing data sources.

A CIO  recently told me the biggest shift he has seen in last couple of years is a focus on the Little – not enterprise apps but mobile apps, not broadcast marketing but personalized, social approaches, sensors as data sources,  not massive interfaces from other servers.

I have a feeling the old Thin/Fat client debates are about to reincarnated, and will be even more heated than those the Dustin Hoffman movie caused.

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