While listening to Ancestry’s chief scientific officer Dr. Catherine Ball talk about data mining the database of genetic data I could not help but hear a parallel story to the process of prospect research. 
Ancestry delved into their database to map family trees to genetic data to learn about human migration patterns. The research recapitulated so many stories about how we got to our place in time today. The big data study involved over 1,000,000 people and finding over 500,000,000 different related relationships. A network analysis of the data identified segments of people and those segments were matched against the family trees. Once the data was extracted and segmented to the family trees the research migrated from computer to human researcher who could give attention to the detail and context to the data to tell the story.
This is also the story of good prospect research. We use analytics for our data then rely on the skills of the prospect researcher to weave the data points together into a story. Big data projects are a marriage between computer + human and art + science.
