Chris Reidy, The Boston Globe, February 01, 2012,
Companies are now so overwhelmed by information overload that the MIT Sloan School of Management said it is gearing up to teach a two-day course that aims to help executives cope with massive data dumps and extract meaningful insights from real-time digital data.
Set for March 27 and March 28, the course is titled, “Big Data: Making Complex Things Simpler.” In an MIT Sloan press release, professor Erik Brynjolfsson, director of MIT’s Center for Digital Business, commented on the phenomenon of “Big Data.” According to Brynjolfsson, companies adept at using “Big Data” are “around 5 percent more productive and profitable than their competitors.”
Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, director of MIT’s Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, also teaches in the Big Data program.
“Many managers undervalue the worth of data, but really it is like money in your bank account and you should be getting a return on it,” Pentland said in a statement. “This program will show managers how to capture the benefits of data such as creating better customer analytics or capturing real-time consumer preferences.”
Mobile phones are one rich source of Big Data, Pentland noted. On Black Friday, the big shopping day on the Friday after Thanksgiving, projections on sales could be based on mobile phone activity. Even more intriguing perhaps, mobile phone activity has the potential to help saloon-keepers to track the movements of potential patrons.
“We could predict Black Friday sales before certain stores make their own announcements based on how many mobile phones were in their parking lots that day,” Pentland said. “We also can find out which bars are popular at 9:00 p.m. versus 11:00 p.m. with this type of mobile phone data.”
