Big data is one of the biggest trends in enterprise organizations today. Everybody is talking about how it can provide valuable insights and assist organizations in making better business decisions. But what exactly is Big Data? Where do you find it? What can it do? Let’s start from the beginning:
What is Big Data?
According to SAS, (along with Wikipedia), “Big Data is a popular term used to describe the exponential growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured.” Structured data is, in fact, structured data; think of transaction history at retail chain or an error log at a manufacturing plant. It is easily organized and interpreted. For example, one can look at the data, see that sales spike from 12-1 pm, and infer that it is because people are shopping on their lunch break.
Unstructured data on the other hand, is not easily organized or interpreted by traditional reports or data models because of it’s typically text heavy nature. Forbes mentions Metadata, Tweets and other social media posts as good examples of unstructured data.
Where Can You Find Big Data?
The cost of storing information, or data, has significantly decreased over the past ten years. As a result, many organizations have compiled significant amounts of data around many aspects of business from finance and operations to sales and marketing. However, as Gary Audin said, “Big Data is nothing until it is analyzed so that conclusions can be gleaned and its meaning determined.” So, while organizations have amassed all of this data, it is providing relatively little value until it can be analyzed.
A great way to do this is through data visualization, or taking the massive amounts of data and creating graphical and other pictorial representations. Combining structured and unstructured data sets in a visualized format can help discover hidden correlations which can provide valuable insight on different trends within a market or organization.
How Can Organizations Use This Data?
Big Data can be used in a multitude of different ways depending on what data organizations have and what goals they are looking to accomplish. Here are a few examples of how different organizations can use Big Data:
- Discover Market Trends: Organizations can track keywords, early adopters and other influences on social media sites to uncover hidden market trends. For example, if a brand starts seeing a lot of social media chatter on features or enhancements to a product genre, they can utilize this data to create a new version of the product or release a software update.
- Track Buying Behaviors: A hotel chain can use data visualization models to track room rates and usage by location and date. Combining this with consumer buying behaviors when they visit specific locations, the hotel can uncover different buying patterns and behaviors.
- Analyze Productivity: Manufacturing companies can combine data on plant efficiency, raw material cost, and other contributing aspects, to discover different ways to cut costs and enhance efficiency.
These are just a few use cases for Big Data; there are countless other applications and ways to utilize this data. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can visualize your data tweet us @IVCiLLC or click here to send us an email.