B2B marketing in the petabyte age

This month's lead article in my very favourite magazine Wired posits that we are now in the petabyte age. This heralds 'The End of Science' as we know it. 

The central theory proffered is that with the massive amount of data that we now have, we no longer need to use the centuries-old 'hypotheses->experiment->prove/disprove' empirical approach to make new discoveries, we simply need to analyse and understand what this data is telling us to make advances in the future.

Hmm, at first glance for the B2B marketer of a digital persuasion this sounds very nice indeed. All we need to do is glean this information then give them to the data geeks, then voilà, the answer! Pass me those log files...

But here lies the issue. How do get the answers from all this data? Google may be the undisputed #1 as it worked out to be the most efficient way of organising the web, and even it can't claim to be definitive (e.g. see Knol - an attempt by Google's head of search to fill the gaps in information he says exist on the web). The analysis seems to lag way behind the gathering. We still find that we need to use - shock horror - real people to get the most insightful information when researching. Data gives you statistics, results, validation, but can it give you insight? Can it tell you how people behave and interact with your products?  

If Wired are right, the answer is probably yes, but we just aren't very good at doing it yet. In the near future perhaps those that can create tools to visually interpret data, but in a meaningful way that relates back to actual people and their behaviours, will be very powerful.  Watch this to be inspired.