Big Data - Analytics Engine for Digital Transformation: Where is IS?

It is estimated that 90% of today’s existing data in the world has been created in the last two years (IBM 2015). Four Zettabytes (4 trillion GB) of data are created every year. Data come from sensors, scientific instruments, medical devices, smart phones; digital media including text, video, audio, email, blogs, postings, twitter feeds, click streams, financial and other transactions. The big promise here is that together with traditional data sources, big data offers unprecedented opportunities to study the “pulse of humanity” at granularity levels that were never available before. For the last few years, government agencies, businesses, consultants, scientists and academics from various disciplines have been challenged with the very complex issues of how to harness big data, how to analyze big data an what to do with big data. How to capitalize on the promise of big data? The IS discipline has been challenged as well. Understanding data processing, storage, integration are integral to our field. Transforming data to information to knowledge is the essence of what we do. Supporting decision making with information and analytics has been part of our teaching and research arsenal since the concept of Decision Support Systems was introduced in the 70’s.