Could Big Data help to prevent the spread of Ebola?

IBA GroupMark HillaryI’ve written about Big Data in several blogs here. What it is. How it can be defined. And even how it can be used, but there are two additional factors that really help with any understanding of how Big Data fits into the modern organisation.How do you make it work – what tools are needed to move from just having a large amount of data available to being able to gain insights from that data?Do I have the kind of data that I can get insights from? What kind of insights am I expecting from the information that I have?I have added two links to recent news stories that can elaborate further on these questions.It is no use to anyone if you just have an enormous amount of data, but no tools to analyse it with. You can’t engage with Big Data using an Excel sheet. The volumes involved are often enormous and far more than what you could load into a computer to be studied as a single block of information.So this is one of the first issues to address, and it may be where an expert partner can help the most. Is your data available? What tools can you use to collect together all that structured and unstructured data, and how can you even start to analyse it?Now, what are the kinds of insights you can find? It depends on your business and the type of data available, but with Big Data you can uncover all kinds of relationships between variables that were not visible without the analysis.This example of how Big Data is helping to predict where Ebola will strike next is a great example. It is just taking information we already have such as infections, locations of hospitals, number of doctors and so on, but using past knowledge and these factors to make predictions. Now imagine if you could start applying these insights in your business?Making Big Data work with the right tools and determining the type of insight you need are two important factors in planning how you can make it work for you.