Strategic Implications of the Big Data Era

What are the strategic implications of the huge volume of information now available to businesses?

A “staggering amount of data in digital form” enters the world every couple of days, notes Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist and associate director at the MIT Center for Digital Business. It comes from every interaction each of us has with the Internet, and from industries such as life sciences. In its raw form it is a pure data deluge.

How can executives make sense of — and, as critically, gain competitive advantage from — that much information? Here’s McAfee discussing that topic in a recent interview with MIT Sloan Management Review:

McAfee made his comments in a video webcast with MIT SMR earlier this year, on the topic “Elements of Digital Transformation.” An archive of the full video is available here.

McAfee’s most recent article for MIT SMR is “Winning the Race With Ever-Smarter Machines,” co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Portions of that article were adapted from Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s e-book, Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy (Digital Frontier Press, 2011).