Every minute you are not using Big Data means a
lost business opportunity. In an information society, information is money. The
trick is to generate value by extracting the right information from the digital
universe. Forrester, McKinsey, and IBM have all issued
white papers or reports in the last months discussing the impact that the
analysis of big data will have on business. We may be on the threshold of a
major period of exploration of the digital universe.
Big data isn’t anything new. It is just getting
bigger. As the price of analytic software, sensors and communication devices
continues to fall to one-sixth of what it was in 2005*), mastering of
big data starts to lose intelligence offices privileges and becomes mainstream
thanks to rapid business exploitation.
Big data refers to the totality of information
available - all data that might help create a more complete understanding about
an issue or person or provide an answer to some question. „Big data technologies describe a new generation of technologies and
architectures, designed to economically extract value from very large volumes
of a wide variety of data, by enabling high-velocity capture, discovery and /
or analysis,” as per the IDC study. It is about finding answers
where there are yet to be questions.
Historically all kind of data was used to confirm
or support decisions that had already been made (bar and pie charts), rather
than to learn new things and discover the right answer. The volume and
unstructured nature of so-called “big data” prevented much in a way of
analysis. It was very time-consuming. It required the ability to assimilate
many kinds of media and info sources. But nowadays we have computers that are
close to being able to look at large amounts of different kind of data to provide
summaries, make suggestions, as well as to draw real-time insightful
conclusions.
In recent months all kind of Companies – mainly
coming from pharmaceuticals, retail, telecommunications or insurance
industries - have started to deploy big data strategies. They are shifting
their organizations from using intuition towards making decisions based on
using large-scale data gathering and analytics. Via easy to operate, immediate,
sorted internal and external information from around the world, companies
obtain insights that would otherwise remain hidden. Using those insights
Companies are able to better shape their strategy, to better manage their risks,
to better than competition anticipate moves of customers and industry and thus
they are able to improve their overall performance.
According McKinsey research such
progressive companies record measurable improvement in productivity and other
performance measures: „A
one-standard-deviation increase toward data and analytics was correlated with
about a 5 to 6 percent improvement in productivity and a slightly larger
increase in profitability in those same firms. The implication for companies is
that by changing the way they make decisions, they’re likely to be able to
outperform competitors.“
As the big data management tools will continue to
become standard business enabler, future competitive advantages will be in the
hands of those, for whom it will become a new type of corporate asset. These
will be companies that have made a commitment to regard data need highly. They
will be able to build a low-cost, reliable infrastructure for data collection
and storage using digital assets. They will be not only able to capture more
and better data, but they will also have the possibility to do a fundamentally
different decision making. They will be able to use data timely and effectively
across the whole organization, they will be able to drive the changes in
organizations that are coming their way. They will test hypotheses and analyze
results to guide investment decisions and operational changes. They will
collect best practices for leveraging and extracting value from data. They will
no more operate in internal silos, as they will use one collective info-net.
“The ultimate value of a big data
implementation will be judged based on one or more of three criteria (IDC
study):
- Does it provide more useful
information?
- Does it improve the fidelity of the
information?
- Does it improve the timeliness of the
response?”
Upcoming period of the digital universe
exploration will not be without its challenges. But it will represent a unique
opportunity for those Companies who are up-to-speed and ready for fast adoption
of new technologies. Huge flood of data and analytical opportunities will
create more value for people who can be creative in seeing patterns and for
people who can be entrepreneurial in creating new business opportunities that
take advantage of these patterns. The success of many enterprises in the coming
years will be determined by how the Co. will thrive in driving the required
enterprise adjustment – not just on the technical site, but on the cultural,
people site as well.
*) „Technology has helped driving the cost of
creating, capturing, managing and storing information down to one-sixth of what
it was in 2005. Since 2005 the investment by enterprises in the digital
universe has increased 50% - to $4 trillion.“ IDG study
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