12 Amazing Big Data Success Stories for 2016

Every year I ask myself the same question. Will there be any tangible, coherent and verifiable Big Data success stories in the coming year? Every year I come up with nothing. Nothing at all. “Sorry, no rooms at the Big Data Success Inn, as we are closed for vacations.”

However, this year things are different. More positive, more alive and more fantastic.

As you can probably guess, I am well excited to be able to reach out and tell you about the twelve amazingly fab Big-Data stories that will appear during the course of 2016. The year of the incredible, startling and awesome Big Data monkey.

To this end, and as this is a magically special occasion, I have made an extra-special effort to deliver the goods, to do full justice to the task, and to go that extra Big Data kilometer for my demanding readership.

So, I gazed into Madame Frufru’s crystal ball, I opened up the kimono with the Ouija spirits of Von Neumann, Babbage and Jobs, and I pushed the envelope in the vast disruptive solution-spaces habited by Ada Augusta, Audrey Tautou and Jennifer Saunders… and, I came back with the best of the best.

I only hope it was all worth the blood, the sweat and the tears.

So, here for your veritable delight and salutary entertainment, I give you the twelve remarkable Big Data success stories of 2016.

Big Data leads to massive government savings – 2016 will be the year in which right-thinking, common sense and pragmatic governments around the world will leverage Big Data to bring about a radical reduction in government expenditure. Unchained from the dogma of professionality, administrations will replace overpaid, over-educated and over-bearing statisticians, with Data Scientists who can produce ‘the required numbers’, a priori, and at a tenth of the cost. If this works well, as no doubt it will, other professions, such as medicine, teaching and the law enforcement agencies, will also be subjected to the Big Data treatment. Why pay a professional Doctor, Teacher or Police Officer their exorbitant fees and salaries, when a Quack Scientist, Chalky Scientist or Plod Scientist can fill their places, and for a fraction of the cost.

Big Data clamps down on gum chewing in Singapore – Radical Polymer masticating criminals are the bane of the upstanding street-walking citizens of Singapore. However, in 2016, this will change. Why? Because Big Data will be used to identify, track-down and apprehend gum-chewing, sidewalk spoiling and anti-social spearmint-breathed offenders. Yes, capital punishment for such offenses may seem harsh, but remember, if Hadoop says it is a heinous crime, especially if it’s backed up by expert social media opinion, then it must be right.

Big Data solves the Climate Change conundrum – Following the amazingly successful climate talks in Paris this year, 2016 will herald in a period of fantastic adjustment in how climate change is seen, measured and addressed. No longer will Climate Change it be seen as a threat or a problem, but as a seriously good opportunity for market capitalism in general, and Big Data in particular. Measurement of temperature changes will no longer be made, but massive Big Data technologies will collect climate change opinions from global social media, and that will be our unique guide to the actual effectiveness of the fight against things ‘getting too hot’. Big

Data will lead the way, and factor 10,000 sun blocker and super-mega walk-in fridge-freezers, will follow.

Big Data helps put Real Madrid back in the top tier – The BBC* might not like it, but Big Data will triumph in sport in 2016, thanks in the main to its innate ability to help Real Madrid win the Champions League, the Spanish League, and the Spanish King’s Cup. Even though the mighty-whites have already been eliminated from the last of these competitions (for fielding a Big Data player who was under a match ban). Okay, so Big Data can’t get it all right, but no one is perfect.

*Bale, Benzema and Cristiano.

Big Data knocks out Data Warehousing – In 2016, Big Data will finally put Data Warehousing to bed. It’s been on the cards for a while now, but in 2016 it will be proven beyond any shadow of doubt that the best input into strategic, tactical and operational decision making are massive concatenations of simple word counts, done on a vast array of what people are now describing as commodity hardware. Commodity hardware, to distinguish it from the other hardware that we were using up until now, which was also confusingly termed ‘commodity hardware’.

LinkedIn publishes its first ever Big Data success story – Incredible, but true. In 2016, LinkedIn will get its resident Big Data guru, data master and influencer to document a tangible, coherent and verifiable Big Data success story. It will matter not a jot that it is a knock-off plagiarism of a late nineteen-ninety Data Warehousing partial success-story, as it’s the thoughts, and not the facts, that count.

Queen Brenda inaugurates the Lady Di Memorial Big Data Lake – During 2016, HRH will inaugurate the former Windermere Lake as the new Lady Di Memorial Big Data Lake. Millions of subjects will hail this as a clear success story for Big Data and for Britain. The inauguration day will be slightly marred (no pun intended) by a gushing Big Data guru being told to beggar ‘orf by none other than Phil the Greek.

Big Data housing becomes an issue of significant importance to the EU – Because of the incredible speeds amazingly valuable Big Data is being created at, the EU will move to take measures to capture and more importantly store all of this new Big Data. There will exist an existential realization that none of this life-giving Big Data should be lost or compromised, or both. Chancellor Merkel has already come out strongly and offered to take much of the generated Big Data in 2016, which will be housed in both public and private premises. For example, each German household will be asked to house volumes of Big Data based on the size of the family abode, the internet bandwidth and the number of smart phones im haus. France and Spain will follow suit, but with modestly reduced quotas. The UK will spend most of 2016 trying to opt out, and will even threaten a Big Data Referendum if the onus on them to take so much Big Data is not radically reduced. So, in net, a win-win for Europe and Big Data.

The CIA will be charged with custodianship of all Big Data success stories – During 2016, together with the custodians of Fort Knox, the CIA will be charged with custodianship of all tangible, coherent and verifiable Big Data success stories, and only those who should know, and can handle the power of information, will have access to the files. This will be done to avoid information of global importance from falling into the hands of evil-doers, delinquents and busy-bodies. This is a success story because it will demonstrate once again a truly tangible, coherent and verifiable Big Data success story. The Head of the FBI was unavailable for comment.

Big Data solves world issues – For years we have struggled to see the elephants in the global room. Now with the help of Big Data, not only will we finally be able to see them, but also we will have a key component of the solution within a click of the mouse and a rapid stroke of a smartphone gesture. Yes, hunger, poverty and the refugee crisis can all be identified in 2016, thanks mainly to Big Data. What’s more, if we get the political will to do so we can also think of ways of partially, or wholly, fixing those problems. Although admittedly that is a ‘big ask’ of Big Data, especially in one enormously hectic year, where the focus of attention will be mainly on the UEFA European Championship, the Olympics and the war on terror. Now if that isn’t a Big Data success story then I really don’t know what is.

Big Data success stories to top a million by the end of 2016 – Thanks to a global and socially responsible market-driven initiative to reclassify Microsoft Access and Microsoft Excel as Big Data repositories, the number of Big Data success stories for 2016 will amazingly exceed a million, and that’s just in Milton Keynes.

Democratic Elections replaced by Mega-Democratic Big Data Social Media Mining – Sick and tired of having to turn out to vote every four years? Tense, nervous pre-election headaches over not being able to think, weigh or decide? Worry no more. Thanks to advanced social-media mining techniques, from 2016 the election of politicians will be decided not by you – least not in the legacy way – but by a broad interconnected raft of machine learning, sentiment analysis and other data science gizmos – guaranteed 100% democratic. This is what we have all been waiting for. The end of old fashioned and boringly DIY-democratic elections, and the heralding of a brave new world of online interactive social-media politics. Don’t look at it as the trivialization of democracy, the puerility of post-modernity and the throwing away of centuries of fights for civil and human rights, look upon it as being real progress – progress with a capital P.