B B Spring 2014
What studio executive could have imagined it: a movie about the role of
computer analysis in assembling a winning baseball team that was nominated for
six Oscars and cleaned up at the box office?
OK, it didn't hurt that Brad Pitt played the hero. But the 2011 movie
"Moneyball," about how the Oakland A's harnessed the power of statistics to turn
its fortunes around and set an American League record for consecutive wins, intro-
duced a lot of people to what's now a hot topic in business and many other fields:
big data.
When manager Billy Beane crunched the numbers and started hiring players
based on the specific ways they could have an impact on the game, it was big data
he was using. Since then, the use of big data has gotten, well, a whole lot bigger.
And, say School of Management professors who are teaching and using the tech-
niques of big data analysis, the field opens unlimited opportunities for those with
the tools to peer into massive databases and profit from what they can find there.
B Y R I L E Y M A C K E N Z I E
Big Data
HARNESSING THE POWER OF