“Although the adoption of Big Data technology and strategy is still slow, it definitely grabbed the attention of executives in many enterprises. However, what businesses really need is insight that helps them make better decisions. If that is the case, I believe one emerging trend of 2013 is going to be ‘smart data.’

Smart data will revolutionise the way we do marketing, make business decisions, and interact with customers. But what is smart data? If big data is the technological foundation for data driven business decision making, smart data is the analytics we use to extract relevant information and insight from big data, and the visualization we use to present the results.

Smart data technology must be designed so that we can make our data both useful and digestible. Big data is often captured without a specific purpose in mind, so most of it will be irrelevant to the problem you want to solve. Efficient search and filtering technology is necessary in smart data to make identifying the relevant data easy, because data that is not relevant can’t possibly be useful. More importantly, the analytics we use must find insight that is actionable – if you can’t take action against it, it’s not useful.

Big data is not only big in volume; it’s also very diverse and complex. Advanced visualization designed specifically for particular data structures is necessary to make big data intuitive to non-analysts. Interactive tools for data exploration are very important in smart data because they will help more people understand the data better.

Capturing big data only gets us part way there. Smart data bridges the gap by facilitating information extraction and insight discovery. Although big data technology won’t help you make bigger decisions, smart data can certainly help you make smarter decisions.”