Readers of these pages will know that Compliance Week closely follows the idea of Big Data. (Don’t miss our virtual conference on ethics and compliance risks in Big Data, happening Wednesday, March 27.) Yes, software vendors and consultants have spun up quite a bit of hype around the subject, but nevertheless, Big Data today is what the Internet was in 1995—a huge and powerful thing, vaguely understood by everyone to be the future of business, even if we had no precise ideas of exactly how it would change our business.
Now an excellent new book has arrived to illuminate the first few steps of that path: Big Data: A Revolution Will Change How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier. (Houghton Mifflin, 256 pps, $27.) It won’t answer every question you have about how Big Data will change the way you will do your job, but it does offer a fascinating, almost unnerving, a glimpse into the mind-bending world soon to be foisted upon audit and compliance executives everywhere.
