Wednesday, October 16, 2013

What business will do with big data?

There are numerous possibilities and it is almost impossible for anyone to prepare a list of how effectively data can be used. It varies on business to business and their needs. It is actually an intellectual property of business to be envisioned, build and nurtured. The most important thing for businesses is to get started. A typical business will start it from their existing investment on BI Infrastructure and extend it against a defined roadmap. There is no such standard road map which fits all businesses but the most typical roadmap which I found interesting was the one presented by Bill Schmarzo (CTO EMC Consulting) in his presentation during O’REILLY Strata Conference 2013. It could be a valuable resource in your learning to get access to the video compilation of the conference. It can be purchased from O’Reilly website. (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920029618.do) or can be accessed from your safari books account.
In his presentation Bill defined 5 levels of BI implementations.
  1. Business Monitoring: Monitoring business performance and flag areas of interest.
  2. Business Insights: Uncover relevant insights buried into data and use predictive analytics to generate recommendations and facilitate decision making into operational processes.
  3. Business Optimization: Create self-sustained analytic models that automate and optimize business processes.
  4. Data Monetization: leverage your business data, insights and investment in developing your analytics IPR to identify new revenue opportunities, may be through your customers or third parties.
  5. Business Metamorphosis:  Use insights about customers, products and market trends to identify new products, services and markets.
For a business, it is vital to understand concepts and capabilities of these implementations but they are equally important for a big data professional to excel in his job. Big data technologies will extend them to new extremes. Best way to understand them is through examples which I will try in subsequent posts.