I’ve found an interesting report relating to data management publised by McKinsey & Co.
http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/pdfs/MGI_big_data_full_report.pdf
The report describes the potential of minimizing information management cost and strengthen the organizational (which means both public and private sectors) values with appropreate data-management tools.
Also, IBM have been investing researches to provide sevices for managing Big data.
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/
The definitions of “Big Data” by these two firms seems to be a bit different.
The McKinsey’s report provides some actual cases in Chapter 3, US health care system, EU public sector administration, and so forth. There is an example of German Federal labor Agency (Bundesagentur fur Arbeit) in page 60, which shows that, by building capabilities for producing (for transparency) and analyzing data, the agency succeeded to reduce spendings without increment of persons unemployed.
Although the report estimates the potential of big data in energy market would be relatively small, I have a bit different idea from that of the report. I think the emergence of new energy (or electricity) technologies, represented by renewable energies, will induce the necessity of proper “Big data” management in near future. As well as the cases of health care or public administration in US and EU presented in the report, Big, unprecedented and complex data of energy would be accumulated by public sector. I am worried that the public sector for energy in Japan might not have both economic incentive and technical capacity for effectively dealing with the data… I hope both public and private sectors in Japan become to have a mind of getting benefit from each other.
written by Toshihiro Mukai (向井登志広)