F1 boss: Marketers wrecking big data

The head of technology at McLaren Mercedes Formula 1 has warned marketers that they threaten to put the kibosh on ‘big data’ by over-promoting it so much that it will no longer be taken seriously.
Speaking to Computing magazine, McLaren Group chief information officer Stuart Birrell said his company had amassed “colossal amounts of data”, especially during Formula 1 race weekends, but was still finding it challenging to gain meaningful insights.
He said: “The marketing boys are in danger of generating huge amounts of cynicism. It’s a bit like Y2K [the so-called Millennium bug] in the year 2000, there’s lots of hype around it.
“There’s lots of good stuff sitting behind big data and many businesses are very low on the maturity curve, shall we say, on how we generate and handle data to generate those meaningful insights.
“[At McLaren Group] we’ve all spent years generating it with SAPs, Oracles and ERPs, lots of data, but what do you do with it? That’s always been the perpetual challenge,” Birrell added.
However, he did concede that in some cases the hype was also having a positive effect, meaning those at board level are now at least taking an interest.
“Lots of people collect lots of data, but how do you get to the meaningful insight and actions coming out of that data? If nothing else, the hype is raising awareness across the business,” he said.
“When you get your chief executives and chief marketing officers talking about big data, you open the door to having a smart, sensible conversation with them about what do they want to do, what do they not know about their business that we can help them with.
“And so it’s a double edged sword: I think big data is amassing hype, but I think it is an education process with the wider business.”