• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, January 23, 2013

On a panel on “right-sizing” data, Vikram Somaya, General Manager, WeatherFX, The Weather Company, says people working with Big Data have to “be comfortable with discomfort.” He explains data is often wrong, often dirty and hard to work with. “You need to be fundamentally comfortable with that and develop easily-executable tests” to optimize campaigns, he said.

Fellow panelists Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, and Mark Miller, who leads the CRM practice at Digitas, argued against the idea of information overload as a result of embracing Big Data. “It’s about defining the problem first, and then going to the data,” said Miller. He sees data as more an “enabler than dectractor.” Morgan, meanwhile, believes who feel overwhelmed by Big Data don't know what they're for in the first place.