Big Data, Big Dupe

Overview

"Big Data, Big Dupe" is a little book about a big bunch of nonsense. The story of David and Goliath inspires us to hope that something little, when armed with truth, can topple something big that is a lie. This is the author’s hope. While others have written about the dangers of Big Data, Stephen Few reveals the deceit that belies its illusory nature. If “data is the new oil,” Big Data is the new snake oil. It isn’t real. It’s a marketing campaign that has distracted us for years from the real and important work of deriving value from data.

Author Biography

Stephen Few is the founder of the IT consultancy Perceptual Edge. With 35 years of experience in the field, he harbors an ardent love/hate relationship with IT. The world is inundated with far too many unneeded and poorly designed IT products. The great promise of IT is being undermined by an irresponsible industry and poorly skilled practitioners. He advocates a more thoughtful, ethical, human-focused, skills-based, and design-oriented revolution in IT to reduce the waste, prevent further harm, and set our feet once and for all on the path to an “information age” worthy of the name. He speaks, teaches, and consults around the world and writes the quarterly "Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter." He is also the author of four other books: "Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten," "Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring," "Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis," and "Signal: Understanding What Matters in a World of Noise."