Great insights are achieved when you combine different data sources. This Mixed Data approach enables organizations to have a better understanding how their organization is performing and what the different areas of attention should be. Such insights will enable manager to make better decisions and improve an organizations performance. In fact, research by Bain has showed that companies using analytics are 2x more likely to have a high financial performance than organizations not using analytics.
Even more, data-driven organizations that have successfully implemented a Big Data Strategy are 5x more like to make faster decisions and are 3x more likely to have a better execution. Of course, these alone would be sufficient reasons to start developing a Big Data strategy for your organization.
Fortunately, research from Information Week suggests that 2015 will see a steep increase in organizations that want to move into the Big Data space. For the companies surveyed, the most important reason to start with Big Data is to find correlations between different data sources in order to gain more insights and to be able to, especially, predict consumer behaviour. As a result, more organizations change their decision-making process to be able to better approach their customers with the right product/service/message.
According to the below infographic for example, developed by PWC, it shows that 66% of retail executives surveyed have already changed their organisations approach to decision making as a result of Big Data analytics, and another 32% plan to do so. As a result, these retailers have either employed a dedicated Big Data team, changed the way data is presented to the management or relied on advanced analytics for better insights to improve their decision making.
According to the same survey, 44% of retailers expect to make a big decision at least once every month. A decision that impacts the course of the company and therefore should be taken with the right insights and information at hand. Big Data analytics significantly improves this decision-making, resulting in a better-managed company. Intuition and gut feeling may not be a good indicator when making such decisions and should therefore be reduced to a minimum.
