Wednesday, August 7, 2013

What's so Big in Big Data?

Organizational leaders require analytics to exploit their growing data and computational power to be smart and get innovative in ways they never could before. Consider retailing for example. Physical bookstores could track which books they sold and which did not. They could tie some of those purchases to individual customers if they had a loyalty program. These bookstores had limited information and thus could not make informed decisions. Then the online shopping and e-commerce gained popularity moving transactions to the internet. This transformation resulted in businesses gaining better insights of who their customers are and their behavior. Now online retailers can not only track what they bought, but can gain information about what other items they looked at, how they were influenced by promotions and reviews. 
Every day business and consumer life creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: posts to social media sites, sensors used to gather climate information, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is called big data. 

Big data is more than gathering data; it is about finding useful insights that can be used by organizations in making decisions. Leaders across countries consider big data as a management revolution where enterprises analyze massive amounts of data to identify valuable information. Senior executives now prefer to run businesses on data-driven decisions. They require scenarios and simulations that will provide guidance on the best actions to take. 

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