We all know of at least one incredible example of a company discovering something in their data that helped them to attract thousands of customers and made them millions in additional revenue. A study by IDC found that organizations classified as "Fact Finders" — described as more analytically oriented — are 20% more likely to be among leaders within their industry.[i]
Analysts estimate that are about 2.7 Zetabytes in the digital universe today and that by 2020 that data will grow to be 50x what it is at present. That is a huge amount of data with potentially hidden treasures somewhere in it. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be willing to admit that working with all this data and the analysis to get real results is challenging.
Organizations today are spending a lot of resources to collect, de-dupe, transform and normalize the data prior to its processing. But before all of these processes can begin, you must first start with the data: you must first identify the missing information and discard the noise. Only then can the real work starts.
Let’s take the example of cross-selling. All we need to do is collect some history, look at who bought product A and already had product B and then determine if there are any correlations like age, region and size so we can perform the same connection on customers who only have product B. It’s actually a lot harder than it seems, and it’s definitely not as intuitive as it appears.
Despite common belief, managing and working with big data and getting good results require hard work and a lot of knowledge.
Most large companies (with lots of data) have a heterogeneous IT Infrastructure with data residing in legacy databases (and other file structures) on Mainframe, Unix and Windows based systems, as well as state of the art databases on these same platforms. Most of them will already have some data in the cloud, and are thinking about collecting and using data pulled from social networks. Before you leap into a big data assisted project, make sure you have the answer most, if not all, to the following questions:
So what we are saying is that big data presents some very interesting business, technical and operational challenges. The opportunities may be compelling but it will take firm commitment from the organization at all levels for it to succeed. Any big data project is a collaborative effort across all roles within the organization. Make no mistake – big data is not an IT exclusive endeavor!
About Mike Cho
Michael Choe is vice president and managing director, CA Technologies, Asia North, which covers Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. He leads a team of IT professionals to build profitable relationships with customers and partners in this key growth region. Prior to this role, Michael spent over four years as vice president of South Korea where he successfully established and grew the CA Technologies business in South Korea.
Michael has more than 14 years of experience in the IT industry. He joined CA Technologies in 2005 and has held various positions of increasing responsibility across sales, operations, and finance in New York, Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
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