Sublime

increasingly using them to monitor and optimize their networks.

The

The problem is that in addition to performing all of the activities needed for their individual BI project, they have also become the de facto program managers. Decisions related to tools and technologies, data architecture, technical standards, meta-data management, methodology, and other program-level activities are made by them.

big data promises—or threatens, depending on how you view it—to upend legacy technologies within many companies.

There are so many new, large data sources becoming available that nobody is up to speed on all of them. There may be only a few people in a given industry who

The genome-sequencing competition demonstrated this: of all the solutions submitted that were both faster and more accurate than the benchmarks, none came from computational biologists.

on customer-oriented analytical applications involving personalization, ad and e-mail targeting, and search engine optimization.

Given the right set of conditions, the crowd will almost always outperform any number of employees. —Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

The research on innovation identifies this as a common problem for managers as companies grow. Barnholt calls it the tyranny of large numbers, explaining that “there’s a natural tendency to think in terms of bigger bets as you get to be bigger.”