Big Data: A Brief Overview...

The world of DBMSs, data warehouses, data mining, business intelligence and analytics is pretty complex and has been around for some time, but "Big Data" is different again...

Big Data definitions

The McKinsey Global Institute defines big data as: "data sets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and analyse." However, big data is more than just high data volumes and analytics but about the varying types of data and "data feed velocity", i.e. real-time data.

Big data is also about an organisation using its own data, supplemented by industry data, social media data, Internet data, publicly sourced data and that provided by specialist big data accumulators. And where does this data come from? It's from a variety of sources, e.g. M2M sensors and RFID chips, scanners, smart meters; mobile phones; payment and loyalty cards; social media feeds and the Internet; and, all this in vast volumes.

Improved efficiency, improved innovation & business creation

As the amount of data grows and access to more data sets becomes more prevalent, organisations are learning how to manage, analyse and make use of this data via high performance analytics. The belief is that big data and analytics can unlock and open new information: on customer types/profiles/segments; on customer behaviours and demand forecasting; on fraud detection; on supply chain optimisation, etc. This means that organisations should be able to make better and faster decisions, to produce greater efficiencies, to create business innovations and more focused R&D; and, ultimately create new business opportunities... using real-time data. Indeed, the Centre for Economics and Business Research estimates that big data in the UK will generate business efficiencies of some £149bn between 2012 and 2017!

The CIO's perspective

For the typical CIO, big data feels like a disruptive technology. Many are struggling to understand where to start, how to create business value, how to manage and control the "beast" and how to create a vision of where to take the organisation on its big data journey. Within all of this is a key metric for them to understand: their ROD (return on data) value, i.e. understanding the assets they have and their potential impact; reducing the cost of extracting the "gold nuggets" in their data; and, helping their users to make better decisions dynamically.

However, the vast majority of companies are either ignoring the big data opportunties; are reactive and using only "point" analytics, in silos within their organisation; or, they are still learning to use integrated sets of tools to manage their big data.

Of course, the ideal scenario is the proactive organisation that views big data as an asset: where they have implemented people, platforms, processes and technologies to gain insight and enable better decision-making, thus creating competitive advantage. Unfortunately, one recent report positioned just 2% of companies as having achieved this level of maturity.

So, the platforms, tools and solutions to help deliver the promises of big data remain some way off...

Technology insights & decisions made easy...
www.tech-research.co.uk