The Coming Tech-led Boom

The Coming Tech-led Boom is a recent article published in the Wall Street Journal.

In January 2012, we sit again on the cusp of three grand technological transformations with the potential to rival that of the past century. All find their epicenters in America: big data, smart manufacturing and the wireless revolution.

Now, that’s what I call timing because I’ve been staking out the ground on two of those technological transformation – Smarter Manufacturing (on my @ Supply Chain Management blog) and Big Data here on this blog. My views on Smarter Manufacturing are here.

As for Big Data, this is what the authors have to say,

Information technology has entered a big-data era. Processing power and data storage are virtually free. A hand-held device, the iPhone, has computing power that shames the 1970s-era IBM mainframe. The Internet is evolving into the "cloud"—a network of thousands of data centers any one of which makes a 1990 supercomputer look antediluvian. From social media to medical revolutions anchored in metadata analyses, wherein astronomical feats of data crunching enable heretofore unimaginable services and businesses, we are on the cusp of unimaginable new markets.

While much of this is true, does it sound like a prediction? To me, it sounds like the inevitable inference. Except that I think a different actualization of the potential of Big Data. While we’re at the point of Big Data storage, retrieval, analyses, manipulation etc that is not the point of Big Data <anything>.

I see Big Data as a Resource like water or oil for example – a vast landscape to be discovered, molded and valued. That is the new economy – powered by a new resource altogether…