Arnaud Bacros, Country Manager at EMC. focus on Data and deliver his opinion : Big Data as an ‘antifragilizer’: how to thrive in an uncertain world. More data you have at hand and the faster you can analyze it—preferably in real time—the richer and more accurate the insights that it offers will be.

“When I read the masses of articles, white papers or opinion pieces that have appeared about Big Data and predictive analytics, I sometimes feel they feed the wrong impression. Don’t get me wrong they are a powerful pair. Obviously, the more data you have at hand and the faster you can analyze it—preferably in real time—the richer and more accurate the insights that it offers will be.

However, being able to develop increasingly accurate models and forecasts in a near-real-time mode on the basis of a vast amount of data—predicting what’s next in other words—does not a crystal ball make. A small illustration: if you can increase your accuracy of knowing the outcome of a coin toss by 25%, you would theoretically be right 62.5% of the time. No denying that this is a significant improvement. But we should always be aware that we can still be incorrect 37.5% of the time.

Big Data is not infallible at predicting

Ok, but if Big Data is not infallible at predicting, why do we need it, then? Well, because it allows you to develop all the essential characteristics that you need to survive in this VUCA world, ruled by Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. In an uncertain environment that changes faster than its own shadow, we will honestly never be able to fully eliminate surprises or mistakes. We are living in a world beyond control. When a market can change from one day to the next, it is not possible (and we can wonder if it ever really was) to predict the future. And yet, that seems to be what so many companies are expecting. They want to fight chaos with order. They want to be able to see what’s next and plan ahead as much as they can for that.

This approach is no longer possible today. We can never be perfectly sure of what is next up the road. Big Data cannot take away the uncertainty of the current market. It is about acknowledging this uncertainty—rather than trying to beat it to death with long-term planning and predictions—working with it and even turning it into a competitive advantage. It is about being nimble and agile.

Big Data helps you to be fast

It offers you the intelligence that you need to change your course in a heartbeat. It allows you to test innovations quickly and then incorporate them fast if you need to. Big Data and predictive analytics are not about the future, because no one can predict it with 100% certainty. Big Data is all about the ‘right now’. It is about finding out that your customers are massively surfing on the website of a competitive mobile services supplier, finding out about his aggressive promotions and countering those in the smartest possible way.

In a world beyond control and certainty, we should be making our companies `antifragile’, to use writer and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s view. Things are `antifragile’ when they gain from chaos. Human bones, for instance, get stronger when subjected to stress and tension. Rumors or riots intensify when someone tries to repress them. Many things in life benefit from stress, disorder, volatility and turmoil. Just like that, we should not try to make our organizations more robust or try to fight uncertainty by trying to predict, structure and plan. This is counterproductive and makes us even more fragile, if anything. We should just make sure that we have the insight to not only adapt to this uncertain environment, but thrive in it. That is what Big Data does: make the uncertainty that we live in work to our advantage.”

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