Big Data Without Big Headaches

The three areas that I outlined are fairly complex and require a lot of technical skill and training, making it hard to scale across the entire spectrum of retailers. Applying a purpose-built data refinery approach to the broader set of big data issues in e-commerce will eliminate the data scientist bottleneck and still allow retailers, big and small, to benefit from the insight that data capture and analysis provide. When domain experts can work directly with machine learning systems we'll have entered a new age of big data where we learn from each other. Hopefully then big data will actually solve more problems than it creates.