Beat the buzz – what is big data and what can it do for you?
By Mervyn Mooi, director at Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID).
Johannesburg, 20 March 2014
Buzzwords are something of a double-edged sword. One the one edge they help businesspeople, who in the past didn't always have the strongest handle on technology, to access the idea of what technology could do for their organisations. On the other, however, they dissolve understanding and erroneously inflate importance of a technology, presenting it as the silver bullet that will murder business woes and breathe new life into competitiveness.
The truth is that very few technologies have been able to do that and none has emerged as the silver bullet. Quite the opposite – silver bullets are arguably a misconception of Freudian proportions, the pursuit of which have and always will be a very average human folly.
Nonetheless, it is a well documented fact that technologies emerge, undergo one or several iterations of refinement, then ultimately fall afoul the marketers curse and get hyped all the way to the seven lower layers of Dante's campfire.
Big data could, again arguably, slice very neatly into that corpse. Ergo the questions: what is it and what can it actually do for companies? Perhaps more importantly: how can companies harness the possibly overwhelming potential of a technology much talked and far less walked?
At its most elevated, big data is an important source for business intelligence (BI). It presents businesses with an opportunity to acquire lots of data and information and pump that into their business systems from where they can begin to make sense of it and use it to ultimately sell more stuff or services. The difference between big data and other, more prosaic data, is that the big variety often includes a) a lot more, b) a lot more different types (think video, voice, text, metadata and so on), and c) a lot more sources (going beyond the traditional customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and their ilk to include social media channels such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, website message fields, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS and so on).
As always there are a few issues that must be considered as part of that process. You need to make sure that the data you collect is of a high standard. There is an entire industry devoted to that heavenly objective for a very good reason. It's not as easy as it sounds. The next trick for your little multi-talented werewolf is to somehow make sense of what you collect. Once again it can quickly become an undertaking of biblical complexity – and that implies a level of risk few organisations can either cope with, in the fiscal sense, or are willing to accept.
The rewards, however, are worth the effort of figuring how to mitigate the risks to glean the advantages. Businesses need to be able to change. Demand to increase the pace at which they can change is now greater than ever before. Why? Because their customers can change so quickly with the advantage of social media's channels of communication and if businesses can't keep up then they'll lose their customers and with them their revenues. Getting at the data and information, populating analysis systems and making sense of it all means that businesses can act in near realtime.
What's more, with all of that immaculate information following considered analyses, businesses will unlock the secrets of their customers' souls and knowing those means they have the opportunity to make them the happiest cherubs of all.
Only the most myopic businesspeople haven't heard about big data. Most have a vague understanding of what it is and few know what it can actually do for their businesses. Organisations that don't invest in big data research and analyses for BI purposes will find themselves limited compared with their competition. Most people already use the Internet to gain access to vast tracts of data and information. The compelling argument for following suit, via business process, is that the data and information is largely free of charge.
Big data presents opportunities for consumers in commerce, relationships and knowledge acquisition, such as for education, which is rapidly becoming mobile and done away from campuses to save time and eliminate travel costs.
Today those are competitive advantages but in the near future they will be prerequisites. Those that fail the entry exam will be scattered like vampire dust before they even see the light of day.