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This chapter is excerpted from ‘Obtaining Value from Big Data for Service Delivery'. Big data is an emerging phenomenon that has enormous implications and impacts upon business strategy, profitability, and process improvements. All service systems generate big data these days, especially human-centered service systems such as government (including cities), healthcare, education, retail, finance, and so on. It has been characterized as the collection, analysis and use of data characterized by the five Vs: volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value (of data). As the plethora of data sources grows from sensors, social media, and electronic transactions, new methods for collecting or acquiring, integrating, processing, analyzing, understanding, and visualizing data to provide actionable information and support integrated and timely senior and executive decision-making are required. The discipline of applying analytic processes to find and combine new sources of data and extract hidden crucial decision-making information from the oceans of data is rapidly developing, but requires expertise to apply in ways that will yield useful, actionable results for service organizations. Many service-oriented organizations that are just beginning to invest in big data collection, storage, and analysis need to address the numerous issues and challenges that abound-technological, managerial, and legal. Other organizations that have begun to use new data tools and techniques must keep up with the rapidly changing and snowballing work in the field. This booklet will help middle, senior, and executive managers to understand what big data is; how to recognize, collect, process, and analyze it; how to store and manage it; how to obtain useful information from it; and how to assess its contribution to operational, tactical, and strategic decision-making in service-oriented organizations.