"Data broker industry" - What is that? - In 2012 it generated $150 billion in revenue

Apparently, that's twice the size of the entire intelligence budget of the United States government

Read this one along with the my previous post, you get better picture

According to the article:- 

As 2013 came to a close, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) issued a scathing report about the role and unchecked power of data brokers. Following a year-long investigation by the Senate commerce committee into the collection, use and sale of consumer data for marketing purposes, he called these companies and their practices "the dark underside of American life."

Federal Trade Commissioner Julie Brill says "your smartphones are basically mini tracking devices" that supply "the kind of information that really talks about who you are on a day-to-day basis."

Brill says. "Consumers don't know who the data brokers are. They don't know the names of these companies."

The largest of these companies -- Acxiom, Datalogix, Epsilon and Experian (this company holds our credit history) -- are bridging together data from the online and offline worlds and selling it to the likes of Facebook, Twitter and others to enhance their respective ad products.

"I think consumers care less than we think in the moment. They care in the abstract sense," Kleinberg says

The links below has more information:

http://www.cio.com/article/750322/Inside_the_Shadowy_World_of_Data_Brokers

33 percent of Fortune 100 organizations will face an information management crisis within the next three years

This warning is from Gartner last week



SNIPPET:

Gartner advocates for a much broader approach based on three deceptively short steps:

1. We recommend that IT leaders identify the crucial business outcomes that need improvement or that are being held by poor information management. 
2. They need to determine the business processes and leaders most impacted by those outcomes, and use their findings to start setting priorities for a new EIM program. 
3. They need to adopt a program management approach for EIM, to identify work efforts, resource commitments, stakeholder expectations and metrics for success.”

The links below has more details:

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/blogs/integration/the-coming-data-doomsday.html



Gartner's URL

http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2672515

Contrarian View - "Data Scientist" - Hot title but not according to Miko Matsumura

 

According to him:

Not only is Data Science not a science, it’s not even a good job prospect.

You will be subjected to the data equivalent of dumpster diving. But surfacing insight from a rotting pile of enterprise data is a ghastly process—at best. Sure, you might find the data equivalent of a flat-screen television, but you’ll need to clean off the rotting banana peels. If you’re lucky you can take it home, and oh man, it works! Despite that unappetizing prospect, companies continue to burn millions of dollars to collect and gamely pick through the data under respective roofs. What’s the time-to-value of the average “Big Data” project? How about “Never”?

Here is what someone in  is Slashdot said:

All this means is that you will spend countless hours trying to connect to the client legacy stuff and then countless hours trying to get the data out (without impacting production systems!), so you can then spend countless hours formatting this data around to be able to spend countless hours trying to get this data into your Big Data(tm) solution so you can finally run some algorithms and create results. Now multiply all that by the number of different kinds of databases the client has and you get the idea.

As an IT professional you really do not want to work in this field. No organization keep its data in a clean uniform way, data scientist is like an IT janitor.

The links below has more details:

http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/data-science-is-dead/