It seems no matter who I read these days in agricultural science, when big data is mentioned they troll out a version of the 3, 5 or 7 V’s. Like some ancient mantra it appeals for a blessing from some big data deity: “bring us Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity and Value” it screams from the pages but vhere the vuck did it vume vrom? Vhat vreat vuru vum up vith it?
It appears the source of the three V’s is a 2001 article by Doug Laney that appeared in Application Delivery Strategies, a publication by the business consultancy firm Metagroup.com (which Laney Founded). It can now be found on the Gartner.com web site where Laney is VP. However the moment you read the opening sentence you realise you are going to need waders.
“The effect of the e-commerce surge, a rise in merger/acquisition activity, increased collaboration, and the drive for harnessing information as a competitive catalyst is driving enterprises to higher levels of con-sciousness about how data is managed at its most basic level.”
Fortunately it’s only two pages long but neither the remaining text nor the weirdly annotated diagram at the end add any clarity.
The Mayan Effect
It seems it remained the three V’s until December 21st 2012... yes prior to end of the Mayan Calendar we were living in the Age of the three V’s but shortly afterwards a new V came into being. Born In a special bulletin of The International Finance Investment and Commerce Bank of Bangladesh Veracity became the fouth V.
This was quickly picked up upon by BP (British Petroleum) who also referred to Veracity as the fourth V in their Christmas edition of Innovations magazine however something must have gone wrong in translation as digital magazine in their article at the end of December “Big Data, The Internet Of Things, And The Fourth V” claimed the fourth V was Value.
It was not looking good for this fledgling new state of V. Once a trinity now a tetragram with a split node. Veracity or Value? For the next 12 months it looked like a major split was about to occur when in Feb 2014 Bernard Marr came to the rescue and united the factions to create the pentagram of five v’s of bigger data: Volume Velocity,Variety, Veracity and Value. The Simplest solutions are always the best especially when they mean you can create a longer slide show. Like the trinity of V’s before this new pentagram was made up of parts equal to and as complete as the whole itself. For this is the Church of big data and any old bull shit can be preached here.
Like any new diverse and encompassing church there is room for diversity and growth, as long as it’s V related. The growth in big data congregations since Bernard Marr Unified the two factions has led to the patter of little Veet with the birth of the twins.. Variability and Visualisation. There’s more Vim in this congregation yet and I predict the quadruplets, Virgin (data you are seeing for the first time), Vapour (lots of it but no substance), Vulgar (what virgin eventually becomes) and Vanilla (self explanatory) will be dropping out of big data’s Vlaps very soon.