Adding to the complexities of the CEM landscape is the emergence of big data, as detailed in the recent McKinsey Report Big Data, The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity.

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It has more than 400, 000 registered users, and for a fee it offers detailed analysis of the data such as which organisations do what in a particular area, how much a charity pays its chief executive relative to the average, and so on.

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And cloud based services like Flickr and Twitter are producing massive quantities of detailed (location specific) user data that is available for anyone to mine (as allowed by their users).

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However, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt because the more detailed the data on causes of death, for instance, rather than death as a whole the less statistical significance can be ascribed to them.

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