Gaining real business benefit from investments in big data and advanced analytics means overcoming three key challenges: talent, technology, and culture.

In order to make real progress with big data, companies need an elite core of data scientists: highly trained professionals who know how to use the advanced statistical algorithms and machine-learning protocols that are necessary to handle large and varied amounts of data coming in at high velocity. Handling the growing amount of unstructured data requires special skills.

Unfortunately, there aren’t that many people today who are trained to handle and analyze data sets of this type and magnitude. Graduate schools are producing more and more trained data scientists, but inevitably, companies that make a bet on big data will be drawn into a war for talent. They need to be prepared to fight that war.

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