[GRIT COMMENTARY] Big Data in a Post-Digital Age

The information age…the digital age…Whatever you call it, the fact is that we expect technology to be able to do just about anything these days. Whether that is a major breakthrough in medicine, or a magical new app release that makes our lives a bit easier. Or in the MR world, delivering untold insights without a single survey being deployed.

The importance of the digital age is that it has sped up the research process tremendously, the introduction of automated tasks has brought a level of simplicity that did not previously exist. This is vital as we aim to meet buyer-side demands for faster insight, but at the same time challenging as we try to understand the unstructured elements of the data that we collect and store.

The responses from the GRIT report support this view, and it’s great to see that businesses on both the client and provider side acknowledge that Big Data is, well, a big deal. The global average shows that 44% of buyer-side respondents consider Big Data to be a game changer, while 37% feel it’s an interesting trend.

There’s a world of difference between “game changer” and “interesting trend”, of course, but it’s heartening to see that our industry is seeing the opportunity. As an industry that, dare I say it, has occasionally been reluctant to embrace changes of this magnitude, there’s massive scope for businesses who take a lead to drive real change.

What struck me as a sign of progress was that globally, 46% of respondents have some form of Big Data analytics in use already. No doubt the level of analytics evolve dramatically, but it’s good to see that people are not bandying around words like “game changer” while failing to actually make use of the approach!

What’s going to drive the progress of Big Data is Market Researchers prepared to commit to its future. Inevitably, a lot of that will be the up-and-coming researchers who are less entrenched in established methodologies and more prepared to take risks. So, it was interesting to note responses to the question “If you had to identify one new or emerging skill necessary for the researcher of the future, what would it be?”. In Europe, 12% of respondents chose text analytics/big data while the US it was only 5%. The figure for other regions was 14%. This shows a fairly significant split, and may suggest that the US will be playing catch up from a skills perspective when it comes to generating real insight from big data.

Moving forward into whatever age we find ourselves in, the challenges of volume, storage, variety and complexity of Big Data will continue as the process of amassing data gets simpler and more affordable.

How we address these challenges will define us as an industry and dictate our place as value adding players in the new age. Evolving new methodologies to exploit the opportunities available, building new categorization models that allow us to rationalize the unstructured aspects of the data we collect, and developing smart storage systems that allow us to easily access the crucial elements of data in ever increasing fast and efficient ways will begin to define our role in the new post digital age.