point
The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Harnessing Information Overload

Seema Ambastha
Friday, August 8, 2008
Seema Ambastha
Data explosion
The amount of information produced in the world is increasing manifold, by almost 30-40 percent every year. Trends imply technology evolution is leading to information explosion from kilobytes to petabytes. As the amount of available data grows, the challenges of managing the information become more difficult and this can lead to information overload or information fatigue.

Take for example the telecom service industry in India. During 2005-2006, on an average, 5.5 million cellular lines were added every month, taking the mobile subscriber base to 157 million from 91 million during 2004-2005. (Source: Annual survey conducted by Voice & Data).

In another case, a large wireless service provider has a subscriber base of nearly 5 million subscribers. Imagine, on an average, every subscriber makes 20 calls per day. Each call generates a call detail record (CDR), which is used for calculating the bill and subsequent collection process, while each CDR implies a revenue opportunity for the telecom service provider. Thus, around 100 million raw CDRs can be generated per day and they get transformed before reaching the billing system. All this data is further stored for 3 months online and subsequently archived. Moreover, the same data (refined and transformed) is used for various other telecom applications like billing, customer care, and business intelligence and this translates the total information to terabytes over a period.

This condition results from having a rapid rate of increase in the amount of information generated, even while days remain 24 hours long and our brains remain in roughly the same state of development as they were when cavemen communicated by scrawling messages on stone. IT managers, therefore, need to develop skills for managing this information overload.

Managing data smartly

Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook