The universe of technologies and processes that most of us know as big data has transformed the enterprise since its advent earlier this century.
Organizations large and small now rely on huge volumes of data to drive all manner of business decisions and support a diverse array of internal processes. They utilize increasingly intelligent analytics tools to make sense of this data and tease out patterns and connections that they’d otherwise miss. They leverage multi-dimensional data observability solutions that provide visibility into data pipelines and give enterprises confidence that they’re making informed decisions based on robust, reliable data supply chains.
They do all this and more in the hope of becoming more efficient, effective, and profitable. And it‘s easy to see the impact of big data if you know where to look. These are just some of the ways in which big data is impacting the enterprise right now.
It Has Already Disrupted Financial Markets
What does the fact that financial companies use big data in high-frequency trading algorithms have to do with enterprises in other industries?
More than you might imagine. Even non-financial enterprises invest spare assets in the financial markets, and they’re highly reliant on those markets as a result. When stocks tumble or rocket skyward, enterprises with skin in the game suffer harm or gain as a result.
High-frequency trading has disrupted financial markets more than any other innovation since the advent of the computer, but it’s unlikely to be the last financial innovation supported by big data. Whatever comes next could be even more impactful.
It’s Making Retailers Better at Selling and Keeping Items in Stock
Big data makes retailers smarter, plain and simple. For example, sellers large and small gather vast amounts of data about their customers as they move through the buyer’s journey. This enables them to serve up better product recommendations and even to develop more finely personalized products in the first place (more on that later).
Big data also enables better inventory management. Long the bane of small retailers’ existence, inventory management is now manageable and cost-effective even for small, independent sellers without armies of people to track and manage stock levels. Retailers still can’t control what happens upstream of them in the global supply chain. But at least they can prepare for uncertainty better.
It’s Enabling Better Sentiment Measurement
Customer sentiment is an exciting frontier for any enterprise that sells to individual humans. If you think about it, that’s most enterprises, as even B2B sales typically rely on interpersonal relationships (between professional buyers and sellers).
Fortunately, customers leave many clues about sentiment as they move through the buyer’s journey (and afterward too). They respond to prompts asking about their experiences, recommend and review products, leave social media comments or likes on sellers’ posts, mention products in social media conversations with their friends, create videos about their experiences, and on and on.
They also express sentiment in more traditional ways, like when they contact customer support to report an issue with a product or purchase a similar product again.
Big data allows sellers to capture and make sense of a greater proportion of these customer sentiment signatures. Once interpreted, this information enables better strategic and tactical decisions around product development, sales channels, and marketing.
It’s Improving Forecasting and Risk Management Across Industries
A big promise of big data is the potential to improve business forecasting within the enterprise. It makes sense that with more data available to train a forecasting model, the more accurate that model is likely to be.
But it’s not just about more data. Big data means different kinds of data as well, enabling enterprises to anticipate known unknowns and perhaps even unknown unknowns better than before. In turn, that informs better risk management practices and helps manage losses.
It’s Strengthening Digital Security and Improving Uptime
A related use case for big data is in digital security and uptime management. This is very much a behind the scenes use for big data, with much of the process handled end-to-end by sophisticated cybersecurity automation. Digital threats move much too fast for humans to counter on their own, after all. But no matter who manages it, the benefit is clear: more uptime for mission-critical business processes and a better customer experience overall.
It’s Improving R&D and Creating Better Products Overall
The various streams of information that comprise big data flows add up to one thing: business intelligence. That’s a very good thing for research and development processes, long considered a steep but necessary cost of doing business in industries that require constant innovation.
By streamlining and shortening R&D, big data produces considerable cost savings without a similar hit to revenue. In fact, better R&D very often means better products, which over time contribute to higher sales. It’s a virtuous cycle that wouldn’t be possible without big data.
Big Data Is the Future of Big Enterprise
Big data is no longer a new or unfamiliar concept. As this list shows, it has proven its usefulness again and again over the years. It will continue to do so for the foreseeable future, long after the tools enterprises use to make sense of it today are outdated.
Yet, even today, enterprises don’t leverage big data equally. Some companies have gone all-in on data analytics and use data-driven processes to make most, if not all, important business decisions. Further, they utilize big data in mission-critical systems that they rely on to serve their customers, employees, and revenue engines.
Other companies are more cautious. They might use big data and data analytics incidentally or through third parties, like in their cybersecurity or defenses, but they aren’t true believers in the power of data.
So far, many of these more cautious companies have done just fine. It’s anyone’s guess whether that can continue much longer in an increasingly data-driven world, however. In the not too distant future, enterprises that choose not to leverage big data solutions may find themselves at a significant disadvantage to more forward-thinking competitors. A full embrace of big data could become the status quo in business. And that could have big implications for the future of the enterprise.
