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techUK's 'Big Data Hero' campaign highlights Big Data leaders in the UK as part of our work to address the Big Data skills gap

techUK's November Big Data Hero

techUK's 'Big Data Hero' campaign continues to champion Big Data leaders in the UK that are working hard to ensure the UK can fully realise the benefits of Big Data and Data Analytics.

techUK's campaign highlights the people that are making a difference and asking them what made them choose this career, how they got there, what their typical day involves and what they most enjoy about their work. We will also be enquiring about the future of the industry and what advice they would give to people considering a career in Big Data and Data Analytics, in light of the current Big Data skills gap in the UK.

This campaign will feed into the work of techUK's Big Data Skills Working Group, which will be looking at ways to reduce the Big Data skills gap.

A new techUK 'Big Data Hero' will be chosen every month, so if you would like to nominate a friend or colleague to be the next 'Big Data Hero' please drop Jeremy Lilley a line with a bit of information about them!

November's Big Data Hero - Matt McDevitt , Principal Delivery Lead at Think Big Analytics

Congratulations to November's techUK 'Big Data Hero' - Matt McDevitt, Principal Delivery Lead at Think Big Analytics.

Read on for a little taster and find the full interview below.

What is your current role and what are your responsibilities?

I am working as a Principal Delivery Lead at Think Big Analytics (consulting company around big data technologies and solutions) where I am responsible for a variety of things including, but not limited to: account management, project management, Agile software development methodology consulting, day to day data engineer and data science team management and mentoring, financial project tracking and forecasting, contractual and legal negotiations.

What do you think the future holds for Big Data?

The term big data has a lot of implications and can be associated with a variety of different types of solutions nowadays. I think we in are still in a relatively early stage of adoption with big data technologies, especially if you translate that to Hadoop and Spark. These technologies have just now reached the level of production grade readiness and enterprise adoption required in order for companies to rely on it to influence major decisions or help with daily operations of the company. If we look at the adoption curves of other technologies like relational databases, we are still very early in the storyline of technologies like Hadoop and Spark that rely on horizontally scalable distributed computing paradigms.

What needs to be done to inspire people to pursue careers in big data?

Demonstrate the new possibilities that are achievable via the use of big data technologies. Cut through the hype and really demonstrate why certain technologies and solution patterns are required to solve business and world problems.