Is Jargon Preventing an Acceptance of Big Data?

IBA GroupMark HillaryThe Smart Data Collective blog recently published a view that there is too much jargon circulating in the industry related to Big Data. In fact, as I mentioned in my last blog, Big Data is itself a term that is often misunderstood and needs more clarity.The blog is interesting because the author takes a good example of an over-used business term, ‘digital’, and explores what we mean when we read and use this term. Many of the definitions from the dictionary have nothing at all to do with the definition of digital business you might expect – modern, hi-tech, and connected.In fact, many more terms are taken from the dictionary and bent and shaped into something new by technology companies. Innovate, disrupt, and thought leadership are all terms that mean something different if you are not working for a technology company, but how can we improve the use of Big Data as a term?The advantage we have is that Big Data is a genuine and meaningful area of data science. It’s not just jargon created for use by MBA students as they discuss their plans for ‘wealth-generation’.Big Data needs to be understood by the general public and by the company leaders that have never really felt that they had to understand technology before. But almost everyone has now used Facebook, or contacted a customer service centre, so it is becoming easier to connect the theory of how Big Data can be used to the ways in which people see it every day.