NSA Big Data is Really a BI Problem

Currently, we are hearing a multitude of thoughts regarding the recently exposed NSA Big Data program.  The current issue of BusinessWeek has a rational essay on it.

From a BI point of view, the essay doesn't say much that we already don't know - the struggle is in collecting data, organizing it, and relating it to other "indexes."  These are basic Big Data/data warehouse concepts.

What I found most thought provoking is this sentence - that the NSA, "if it needs to, it can actively cross the between your statistical self and your real, physical self."  In its purest sense, that's the point of BI - creating a meaningful, actionable, reliable, data-driven proxy that crosses to reality and can be used to influence decision making.

The NSA BI program is built for just a handful of uses (thank goodness) at the beginning of the decision making journey and our BI projects are built for regular, decision-making.  One measure of BI success is decisions per quantity of data collected.  On this basis, our projects have a higher success rate, but let's check this out:

My most popular BI environment has under 200 global users of 24 dashboards - and the data size is about 50 MB.  No matter how you do the success rate ratio it'll be much better than the 18,000 NSA annual uses (what I remember reading someplace) of what has to be a gazillion gigabytes.  Sounds like a negative BI ROI - obviously the NSA would disagree, but then again, their success (no terrorist attack) completely changes the equation.

But it does lead to a BI question for you - are your BI projects getting used enough?  How do you monitor it?  When would you decide to stop a program because it is not being used?