James March, a Stanford-based social scientist... is much more a gurus’ guru than a guru to the general public. He finished second on the gurus’ guru… - Thomas H. Davenport

The availability of all this data means that virtually every business or organizational activity can be viewed as a big data problem or initiative. Manufacturing, in which most machines already have one or more microprocessors, is increasingly a big-data environment. Consumer marketing, with myriad customer touchpoints and clickstreams, is already a big data problem. Google has even described its self-driving car as a big-data project.

UPS are replacing fixed daily routes with dynamic ones adjusted in real time for weather and traffic — again with machine learning. Only cognitive technologies can handle all the necessary data. And at some point supply chains may be powered by autonomously driven trucks, which will bring enormous changes to that domain.

Some organizations are attempting to predict the nature of future jobs and the skills they will require. This is, of course, difficult or impossible to do with any precision.