It is essential to complement the increasing emphasis on "data" with the human judgement, for better decision-making.

How is data gaining significance?

• Most of the processes of day-to-day usage are also getting digitised.
• There is increasing emergence of different social network platforms, blogs, etc.
• Deployment of sensors and adoption of hand-held and wearable digital devices are also increasing.
• Meanwhile, there is explosion in the usage of internet.
• Anything and everything “smart” means greater data volumes at accelerating speeds.
• All these result in huge amount of data being generated on a continuous basis.
• It is estimated that world’s population collectively generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day.
• The world is thus getting increasingly ‘datafied’ in every single moment.

What is the emerging view?

• Insights from vast arrays of data will be a key business differentiator in the near future.
• This is expected to promote popularity of business analytics, and demand for data scientists.
• Deriving insight from data to understand their origin and making sense of the numbers are emphasized.
• This understanding on data will then be used to make informed decisions.
• Increased availability of data, the "big data", can work as raw material for business intelligence.

What are the concerns?

• Understanding - However, more data does not necessarily mean better performance.
• It is essential that the employees are able to incorporate the data into complex decision-making.
• Without ensuring this, investments in analytics can be useless and even harmful.

• Ambiguity - So much data come from so many sources leading to ambiguity, inconsistency and contradictions.
• So the basic principles that make for good strategy or decision often get obscured.
• Mechanically developing strategies “free of human judgment” would thus be a mistake.
• As, decision making and strategy building involves a larger cognitive and sometimes social processes.

What is the way forward?

• Numbers cannot deal with every nuance of a decision.
• Generating insight is an inherently human trait and strategy is a way of thinking.
• However, it is not that data are not useful, as it all depends on how the data are used.
• So processes and human capabilities should keep pace with the computing fire-power and information they import.
• To overcome the insight deficit, Big Data needs to be complemented by big judgment.