I make the case for Big Data and the opportunities it offers quite often on this blog. It will make it possible for you to identify and map the usage and behaviour patterns of a lot of people with respect to the products, software services and several other things that they use. Many marketers and business developers have their own plans for using Big Data.

Marketing strategies are being formulated, SEO optimization techniques are being planned, new product ideas are being thought of, advertisements are being scripted, movies are being made, even as I write this. All looking to capitalize on the learnings from Big Data.

The opportunities on offer can be capitalized on only when there is an understanding of what all the data means. It is not at all enough to just know historic patterns and extrapolate them to predict future behaviour. It is unfortunate that many marketers tend to forget the first lesson in Statistics in the excitement of all the opportunities. They tend to forget that correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation.

Technologies are being disrupted in ever quicker cycles. If Apple had mined Big Data about phone usage patterns, they would never have disrupted and made the iPhone.

Big Data is not a replacement for disruptive innovation. You just have to make use of it to aid innovation. Not incremental innovation like adding a small extra feature. That is no good in the long term. But disruptive innovation. You need to understand usage and behaviour patterns not to make more products that will allow the users to continue using these products and services in the same way. All small companies that have become big, overshadowing the existing giants, have done it by disrupting user behaviour and hooking them on to a newer and better way of doing things.

How will you use Big Data?