Local government has been using citizen data to make decisions on service delivery for some time now. However, we've reached a tipping point where there is simply too much information available for the traditional methods of successfully managing and manipulating data to work.

The term 'big data' was coined by an analyst at Gartner Group in 2001 and describes data sets which are beyond the capacity of commonly-used software tools to capture, manage, and process in a timely manner.The three big data challenges centre on theincreasing volume, velocity, and variety.