As the mountain of digital data continues to grow exponentially, simplicity and necessity are becoming core values for many companies as they develop their Big Data strategies. Dave Bartlett, chief technology officer of GE Aviation (a subsidiary of General Electric Co.), shared how his company is making strategic data collection choices during an interview with Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

“I like to say the art of Big Data is not in how much data you can get just because you can,” Bartlett said, “but what’s the minimum amount of data that you need to get to do the type of analysis or analytical insight to accomplish your objective. Whether it’s optimization of fuel, or optimization of flight path, or something related to customer value on the plane, it’s really about what’s the least amount of data. If you don’t have that architectural principle up front, it’s not going to scale.”

The impact of IoT

The problem becomes obvious when you consider the sheer capability of the Internet of Things (IoT) to collect and share information.

“Machines are so much better at populating data than people are,” Bartlett said. “They never sleep; they can do it tirelessly. Our new GNX engine, for example, can put out 5,000 data points a second. So that’s where you get one Trans-Atlantic flight up to half a terabyte of data. But would all that data really be meaningful? Do you need to collect it all?”

Bartlett continued: “If you multiply that times the almost 40,000 GE engines that are flying today, and then you extend that to all the other engines from other manufacturers in the world, and then everything else that’s connecting to them, you can see, even though you can …. do you want to pay the expense of collecting everything whether you need it or not?”

Distilling the data

Bartlett has helped GE distill down the data into useful, actionable pieces.

“Just as an example, as you fly a plane, the most interesting time is takeoff and landing …. it’s a pretty consistent operation. We can model what the data looks like and really just sample from them,” he said. This aggregation allows useful insights to be reached.

This has Bartlett firmly on the side of simplicity. “We should really limit to when it’s needed for a purpose,” he said.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of GE Innovation Day 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE