The future is in Big Data
With the massive use of information technology such as tablets, smartphones, online business, and video streaming etc. the whole world is now being transformed by data, both structured and unstructured, or in simple term: “Big data”. The collection, mining, analyzing, and using of such data has enormous advantages for businesses to get insights into customers’ behavior and market trends. Knowing how to use it, big data can help businesses to get accurate analyses of market trends as well as valuable information for better decision making. Understand how well company operates using big data can lead to more efficiencies, cost reductions, less risk, faster deliveries and higher profits.
However according to a new study, many companies considered Big data as a technology project so they delegated that to information technology (IT) people. That is a big mistake because big data should NOT be considered an IT project. Big data should be considered as a way to collect, analyze, and using data to determine valuable information to make decision or to plan business strategy. Company owners and executives must consider big data as something that they depend on to manage their company. The job of information technology group is to get information to them faster, better and more accurate. Without understand this concept, many companies will waste money on something that they do not even understand and may lose a good business opportunity.
Today most usage of big data is in the area of marketing to determine customers’ behavior when they walk into the store or when customers access the company website. But Big data can be used much more than just marketing. Big data can be used to improve company’s operations and increase workers’ productivity. For example, big data analytics software can analyze works done by workers on the assembly lines such as how long will it take for a worker to complete a job. Big data analytics can analyze all workers completion time, calculate the average, and suggest improvement. Of course this cannot be used to knowledge workers as their works are not easy to measure, some need time to think or discuss with customers or team members before they can work on their computer.
Big data can also be used to make some decisions better than people as it does not have the “human biases.” Today Big data analytic software analyze massive amount of data to suggest some business decisions and it already changes the business world. This complex software can reviews billions of data, analyze them, and organize the valuable information then suggest decisions without people interfere. For example, trucking companies are using big data systems that collect millions of data from daily traffic flows and suggest truck drivers to drive through certain roads that have less traffic to deliver things on time.
Today, data scientists play a leading role in what to do at many large companies as company owners need someone who can help them to understand market trends and predict the future. A large company owner said: “Today data, data science and data analytics are all crucial tools for everything, from understanding customers to optimizing supply chains. All global companies are investing in big data to gain advantages and the focus has shifted from data collection, database to data use and data analytics. Twenty years ago there were few systems to collect data and extract valuable information as well as there were no systems and no strategy for use of data. Today, hundreds of companies have transformed their industries with big data science. There are more tools developed to process the data and gain insight from it to capture the market. You can process huge numbers of data using MapReduce to break tasks into smaller components to run among multiple machines to get valuable information quickly. Basically, if you do not use big data, you cannot survive in this highly competitive market.”
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
