IBM Tackles Big Data Discovery

As one of the world’s leading technologies corporations, IBM consistently takes advantage of opportunities to increase its market share in the computing and data analytics realm. In addition to hosting data storage platforms, IBM produces ways for customers to analyze data more effectively. Its most recent development is a service package of application programming interfaces (APIs) called the Watson Discovery Service. Watson is intended to decrease the amount of time analysts have to spend organizing and cleaning data and allow them to focus on making data-driven decisions.

The most prevalent issue in data analytics is the struggle to standardize and organize data in a way that makes information usable. Steve Lohr of the New York Times claims that analysts spend 80% of their time cleaning and organizing data for use (Lohr, 2014). The Watson Discovery Service solves this problem by standardizing and categorizing data and making it available for query by the user. The most impressive aspect of the new service is its ability to accurately analyze text sources on a “massive scale” (Forrest, 2016). This allows employees of any level to gather the most important information from numerous sources without having to manually research each source individually.

IT at Work Questions

1. How is IBM’s approach to big data unique?
2. Why is a data organization service so vital to data analysis?
3. What makes the Watson Discovery Service attractive to companies?
4. Do you think the service will make data analysis more accurate?