According to a recent article in Information Week Magazine, research firm IDC predicts that the size of data – what it calls the “digital universe” – will grow to 2.7 zetabytes in 2012, up 48 percent from 2011’s record year. Data collection and storage is growing exponentially and the topic of Big Data is at the forefront of nearly every strategic enterprise discussion these days...

With all this talk about how to handle and process Big Data, how to derive insight and analytics from Big Data and how to store Big Data, there is little conversation around what to do with Big Data after you finally have it.

Marketing automation has been around for some time now, but it’s becoming increasingly popular as many of the marketing and campaign management tools available to both agencies and technology savvy marketers now provide the ability for end-users, such as marketing managers, to create their own complex automated programs. Marketing automation is the initiation of marketing programs based on a pre-defined set of rules or a trigger resulting from a customer action and it’s a great hands-off way to reach a consumer at a potentially critical purchasing decision time...

Not being able to get phone reception in the Chicago metropolis on a recent trip reminded me of one simple fact: not enough foresight and planning went in to the development of the current mobile phone data networks to be able to handle the onslaught of data requests originating from all the smartphones that have saturated the market in recent years...