The Culture of Big Data

Technology does not exist in a vacuum. In the same way that a plant needs water and nourishment to grow, technology needs people and process to thrive and succeed. Culture (i. e., people and process) is integral and critical to the success of any new technology deployment or implementation. Big data is not just a technology phenomenon. It has a cultural dimension. It's vitally important to remember that most people have not considered the immense difference between a world seen through the lens of a traditional relational database system and a world seen through the lens of a Hadoop Distributed File System. This paper broadly describes the cultural challenges that accompany efforts to create and sustain big data initiatives in an evolving world whose data management processes are rooted firmly in traditional data warehouse architectures.