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Spring 2014 B B as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, face challenges in their ability to oversee the markets. "It decreases their ability to see wrongdoing," he says, when trades are made so quickly—"at the millisecond level"—and so frequently, and thus generate moun- tains of trading records. The SEC could ask to see a firm's trading code, he says, "but that itself may be voluminous." He also points to market volatility tied to auto- mated trading, such as the day the Associated Press' Twitter feed was hacked and a tweet was sent out say- ing the president had been injured in an attack on the White House. The AP corrected the mistake immedi- ately, but program trading algorithms that scan the news caused the Dow Jones Industrial Average to fall 143 points before the market recovered in just a few minutes. The way forward Beyond such concerns, though, the professors say big data presents big possibilities for business. Talukdar cites, for example, a recent study by the management consulting company McKinsey saying that big data can help retailers to increase their oper- ating margins by 60 percent and enable U.S. health care providers to improve their efficiency to the tune of $300 billion in annual savings. One limiting factor, he says, is the need for man- agers and analysts who are conversant in the use of big data. The McKinsey study, he says, "reports that in the near term, the United States faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with high-level relevant analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers and analysts to routinely analyze big data and make deci- sions based on their findings." But, he says, "such human resource skills are fundamental for firms to gain a competitive advantage in the global marketplace, and thus they are critical for national economic growth and productivity." Says Ramesh: "Big data has been here for a long time, but we did not have the technology for processing it. If I was flooded with information, I would use only a small portion because I did not have the technology to process the data and see the big picture. Now I can see both the forest and the trees. And this is only going to get bigger." x Riley Mackenzie is a Buffalo freelance writer. "[Big data analysis] skills are fundamental for firms to gain a competitive advantage in the global marketplace, and thus they are critical for national economic growth and productivitiy." Debabrata Talukdar Professor, Marketing