Today’s businesses look at technology to improve their performance. New developments in information technology infrastructures have made available new analytical tools to more and more enterprises. One of them, big data analytics, has turned into a must have capability for any modern business in order to thrive and grow.
Attracting customers and remaining competitive are goals of any business. Having the right information to do it is key. Tools and services are here to collect and analyze the increasing volumes of data that are created from daily business transactions and customer interactions. The Internet has enabled many businesses to have a global reach and to attract more customers who leave a richer variety of data coming at higher speeds than ever before. Smart organizations make use of big data analysis to extract the information that leads to insights that decision makers can use.
What is Big Data and why it’s important
The distinguishing factors of Big Data are high volume, high velocity, and high variety, coming from what people have done or said they will do. Data comes from all areas of an enterprise and in the past, most of it was ignored. It’s the capacity for dealing with those vast quantities of real-time unstructured data and extracting actionable information that makes big data analytics possible. Big Data analytics can uncover correlations, hidden patterns, and deliver the capacity to gain a deeply intuitive and accurate understanding of things.
The need for a strategy
Industry research shows the importance of having a strategy to manage, instead of ignoring, the huge amounts of data that any organization collects in the course of their daily operations.
A clearly defined and executed data analysis strategy makes smarter and efficient enterprises with positive outcomes. It’s a fact exemplified across many industries from healthcare to real estate and city governments. One example is the New York City Police Department use of Big Data analytics to locate and analyze crime patterns in neighborhoods to see if there’s any correlation with weather conditions, sporting events, time of day, traffic, and holidays. Essentially, what the NYPD is trying to do is to bring all this information together to create predictive models that could help police departments to act proactively. Instead of waiting for a crime to occur, if a crime model identifies a potential hotspot of activity based on future conditions, officers can be deployed with enough time to make a difference. Patrol priorities can be influenced to send resources where they can make the most impact on a given day.
The increasing volume and fast-paced interactions with virtual customers coming over the Internet mean it’s almost impossible to have conversations and learn how to improve the performance or develop new products and services. Provided with the ability to quickly gauge and react to changing customer needs and expectations, a business leader will rise to the challenge and move their organizations to new levels.
Building the IT infrastructure for a real time analytics architecture that supports dynamic, artificial intelligence enabled conversations with customers is imperative. But in order for those kinds of investments to be cost effective, Big Data analytics must come into play to deliver the kind of insights that make great decisions. It’s simply not possible to manage the richness and variety of information coming from customer’s behavior and create effective marketing tactics and tasks without those tools.
The digital revolution is not the future, it’s here today. Systems created to interface with customers must be integrated and designed to create delightful customer experiences from marketing, sales, and returns. Big data is not a new concept, it has been around for years. The difference is the technology that has enabled more and more organizations to have the power to apply analytics and gain value from the data streams that come from their operations. Start-ups focused on big data tools and services are growing, eager to satisfy the increasing list of traditional organizations struggling to survive.
