The module will examine the management issues presented by the emerging data technologies which support Big Data. Topics considered will include:
• What is meant by Big Data and emerging data technologies; how can these be defined and what are the characteristics of Big Data
• The strategic role of Big Data; the way in which Big Data can be exploited as part of an organisation’s Business Intelligence strategy and the relationship between Big Data technologies and existing data management technologies
• Legal and ethical issues, with particular reference to privacy and data collection
• Quality issues for emerging data technologies, covering issues such as data quality, testing, validation and value
• The technical context of emerging data technologies with reference to the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technologies (CIoT)
• The business context of managing emerging data technologies, with reference to ROI.
• The international context of emerging data technologies.

100% coursework which will include a presentation weighted at 40% and a report weighted at 60%.

Presentation (1200 words) : a 15 minute presentation on the definition of Big Data and the data quality and testing issues presented by Big Data. Presentations will be given during seminar sessions and students will be expected to interact during the seminars and post seminar questions.
Marking will be 70% for the presentation and 30% for seminar blog posts. This covers learning outcome 2.

Report: a Management style report (1800 words) , based on a scenario, which analyses the implications of including Big Data within an organisation’s BI strategy and evaluates the strategic, business, technical, legal and ethical issues that this presents. This covers learning outcomes 1 and 3.

(note that all the text listed here are available through the university e-books service. It is not expected that students will buy these texts. The nature of the subject means that these texts will be constantly updated.)

Davis K., Patterson D. 2012 Ethics of Big Data O’Reilly
Uhl A., Gollenia L.A. (eds) 2014 Digital Enterprise Transformation Gower (specified chapters only)

Payton T., Claypool T., Schmidt H. 2014 Privacy in the Age of Big Data Rowman & Littlefield

MS Office
Internet
NoSQL Datastores (MongoDB, CouchDB)
Hadoop Framework

1) Discuss and be able to critically evaluate the strategic, legal and ethical issues involved in managing emerging data technologies. (Knowledge and Understanding, Enquiry, Reflection).
2) Research, analyse and critically evaluate data quality issues for emerging and leading edge data technologies. (Enquiry, Analysis, Reflection).
3) Systematically investigate the business and technical context of managing emerging data technologies. (Enquiry, Analysis).

The module uses 13 hours of formal lectures, 13 hours of seminar style presentations and 13 hours of practical work. Extensive use is made of the VLE and of formative assessment.