Impulsando la cultura de los datos en la Festibity 2015

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion”. 

With this phrase from William Edwards, Dr. Marc Torrent, director of the Big Data CoE Barcelona, inaugurated the 13th edition of the Festivity on May 26, the Information Technology festival held at the Camp Nou facilities. This year, the program has focused on the new paradigm that Big Data is assuming in society and how these technologies are generating new business opportunities and new projects based on data.

Having intuitive and interactive interfaces for users in order to make decisions based on the information available to deploy in an infrastructure that allows its processing is one of the needs presented during the day to extract value from data through Big Data. Big Data technology will facilitate advanced data analytics to generate services that allow descriptive, predictive and/or prescriptive analysis of information.

Several studies were also shown at the event that demonstrates the potential of Big Data and the growth forecast for the coming years. An example: the result of the survey carried out by Accenture in April '14 (“Big Success with Big Data Survey”) indicates that '89% of business leaders believe that Big Data will revolutionize business operations as the internet did it. In this same survey, the areas with the greatest impact from Big Data in organizations are shown: 'customer relations' (37%), 'redefinition of product development' (26%), and 'change in the organization of operations' (15%). On the other hand, the Big Data market forecast made by Wikibon has also been shown:

Finally, the challenges faced by Big Data projects were discussed, specifically, how their value for the organization can be specified, how access to quality data sets can be facilitated, and how capacities and profiles can be available. both internal and external in these technologies. In this sense, the Barcelona Big Data Center of Excellence was born, whose objective is to facilitate the introduction of these technologies in companies.

The event was attended by Dídac Lee, director of the FCB in the New Technologies Area and CEO of Inspirit, Érik Brieva, academic director of the "Lean Startup Creation" program at the UPC, and Vicente Guallart, chief architect of Barcelona City Council to present Big Data success stories that have been carried out in these organizations.