Corporate structure has always been based on an employment hierarchy. Workers start at an entry-level position and try to climb their way to the top. When they get to a managerial position, they use the experience they gained as executives and make important strategic decisions.
Among other things, the corporate ladder’ promotes accountability, gives the organization a proper structure and establishes an efficient chain of command.
To be clichéd, it’s basically the gel that holds the corporate world together. But like everything else- emerging technology is disrupting this time-tested system.
Enter Big Data
A quick Google search tells you that big data is extremely large data sets that may be analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behaviour and interactions.
Although those are fancy words, big data is a rather simple concept. It’s a massive volume of data that can be examined to find some useful information.
For instance “retailers use big data in creating customer recommendations, loyalty programs and designing a more personalized buying experience. Using a consumer’s shopping history, marketers target them with personalized offers through relevant mobile coupons. In fact, some retailers have mastered the craft of analyzing big data.
Costco recently received information from a fruit packing company that some of its stone fruits possibly had listeria contamination. Instead of publishing a general warning, the wholesale chain notified customers who had purchased these exact items.
On the corporate level, big data allows organizations to be more analytical in their approach and base their decisions on historical data. These evidence-based decisions are less risky than the ones made on a hunch or even past experiences of the manager.
All this begs a question: Is big data going to make the current organizational structure obsolete? Or in other words, is big data going to break the corporate ladder and replace human experience?
Big Data is Already Disrupting Corporate Structure
It’s rare to find a corporation today that doesn’t have a range of specialists working with data. From data scientists to visualization experts and data analysts, businesses have teams working with a clear purpose of extracting vital information and presenting it in a meaningful visual form. When presented in the form of descriptive reports, this data tells a story in an understandable and influential way.
Data scientists are now being integrating across departments instead of working in isolation. This means they need to have some sort of knowledge regarding the business “unlike the traditional IT teams. In other words, businesses are decentralizing analytics and are moving toward a more data-centric framework.
Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft operate on a structure based on big data. Using traffic information and consolidation journey, these companies regulate pricing and supply of services- supporting operations like sales and HR.
As organizations are becoming data-driven, business decisions are no longer made on gut feeling. Instead, they’re made from meaningful insights and information. Big data anticipate trends, patterns and cycles across the corporate landscape. And as the industry moves forward, it will become more automated.
With businesses becoming reliant on automated analysis, the interpretation of data might go out of human hands. And this would completely change how businesses operate.
What Happens When Big Data Replaces Human Experience
In an article for the Wired, James Cattermole explains how an insurance company required his 15-month old baby to give a cholesterol test. He explains this as one of the many blunders that occur when an organization eliminates human experience from the data analysis. Devoid of human touch, the application of data can many times be outright disastrous.
One of the biggest examples of big data fails is Facebook‘s struggle with fake news. Back in November of 2016, Facebook feeds of the American users were flooded with stories that were misleading, inaccurate and sometimes, downright false. Facebook’s algorithm failed to recognize the false information and it was propagated to the masses.
These days, Facebook has tweaked its algorithm to detect and flag these stories as false. More interestingly, it has incorporated a human element in detecting process by allowing users to report fake stories. This goes to show that simply relying on data and analytics is never enough, the human perspective should remain a prominent feature of any organization’s big data infrastructure.
Human Experience and Big Data: Finding the Balance
Taking everything into consideration, big data on its own should not be the driving force behind an organization’s decisions. Making the best use of data requires finding the perfect balance between the numbers provided by the machine and the perspective provided by the human.
IT systems can offer innovative and powerful tools that assist with text-mining and language detection. They can empower statistical software which allows separating vital information from the terabytes of raw data collected over the years.
But these platforms can allow only point out patterns. After this, human skills are needed to offer subjectivity, inspiration and insight for informed decision making.
Big data has to work in conjecture with the human experience. While many organizations will be inclined to implement automated IT processes to deal with the sheer amount of data they accumulate, there’s no machine alternative to the good old human expertise.
Conclusion
In their obsession with making pinpoint accurate decisions, an organization must not overlook the importance of the human perspective. There many factors affecting consumers that simply cannot be illustrated in stats and numbers. It is therefore imperative to create a blend of big data and human input to craft a powerful decision-making formula.
