Big Data: Where the future of board room decision making lies
What is Big Data?
It is a term used to denote a massive volume of data that is so large that it becomes difficult to process using traditional Database and Computing Methods. This dataset can be both structured and unstructured. There is no hard and fast rule about exactly what size a Database needs to be for the data inside of it to be considered “big” but the traditional businesses generally identifies continuously growing information collected through transactions (examples: daily transactions in Stock Market) or through sensors placed in IOT devices (examples: daily health data collected and stored through a fitness band). These Data Sets are often collected and stored in cloud servers to be further analyzed.
What is Big Data Analytics?
The process of analysing these complex set of data and find out meaningful information such as Hidden Patterns, Correlations, Market Trends and Customer Preferences is often termed as Analytics. The process is aided by modern day tools like Hadoop specifically designed to handle large Data Sets. These Analytics software often allows researchers that lets you upload and analyze massive amounts of business data from various sources in a highly robust environment, whether it be on the cloud, or on-premise. However, handling the information requires understanding of advanced Analytic Techniques against very large, diverse Data Sets, including structured/unstructured and streaming/batch.
Where it is used?
It has been used in the industry to provide Customer Insights for transparent and simpler products and also allows for better Customer Retention. By analyzing and predicting Customer Behavior through these data a company can get a lot of insights on the user’s behavior, preferences, health etc. This becomes valuable insights from product launches to policy making.
The top industries where analytics finds an active usage are Banking and Securities, Media and Entertainment, Healthcare Providers, Education, Manufacturing, Energy, Transportation, Retail, Insurance and Government.
What is the future ?
The hope banking on Analytics is that it will provide more customized service and increased efficiencies in whatever industry the information is collected from. Most experts will agree that Analytics has become a major game-changer and has been partially successful in meeting the goals with which it was touched upon. However, understanding the data is one part and putting it to policy implementation is another. While the concept of Analytics has largely lived up to its hype, the business or policy decision making based on it has not followed actively. This creates a challenging position for the field including funding and return on investment and skills. But since the problem is not with the engineering and is with the business implementation of it, most experts are hopeful that as the time matures we will be able to see more data based decision making in board rooms. According to Research and Market reports, in 2017 the global Analytics market was worth $32 billion and by 2026 it is expected to reach by $156 billion..