University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Data Crush
Book

Data Crush

How the Information Tidal Wave is Driving New Business Opportunities

Christopher Surdak
AMACOM, 2014
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Editorial Rating

9
getAbstract International Book Award Winner 2014

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable

Recommendation

Christopher Surdak, a veteran technology analyst, takes on the business challenges of vast data volumes – or the “data crush” – including mobility, cloud computing and social networking. His solutions turn your customers into individual target markets, demolish familiar infrastructures, send processes to the “cloud” and see human decision making as awfully slow. The sea change he foresees will test your imagination and your determination to avoid business death by data. Surdak usefully ends each chapter with suggested actions, and presents future scenarios from the brave new world. Despite the book’s occasional leaps into the unlikely, getAbstract recommends its prescient prescriptions to business planners seeking a functional glimpse of the future. It’s a wake-up call for those hoping in vain that business-as-usual will endure.

Summary

“Data Crush”

The basic sources of data today are mobile devices, primarily mobile phones – of which there are already more than 6.8 billion worldwide. Smartphones and their apps – 25 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple alone – create and consume vast amounts of data, fed additionally by “mobility, virtual living, digital commerce, online entertainment, cloud computing and Big Data.”

Four “drivers” stimulate the increasing production of data from these channels:

  1. “Pervasiveness” – This is the “network effect.” You can communicate from anywhere with anyone anywhere else. In the US in 2012, people spent 2.3 trillion minutes talking on mobile phones and sent 2.27 trillion text messages. While the number of mobile phone users increases, 34% of households gave up their landlines. They carry their communication with them everywhere they go.
  2. “Connectedness” – You aren’t alone. If you want to talk, “it is highly likely that someone is willing and able to listen”; around the clock some six billion people are in the mobile network. To see the impact of this change in your professional life, note how the workday has expanded outside the...

About the Author

Christopher Surdak is an information technology professional with decades of experience in formulating strategy and enterprise-level information management systems.

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