The Importance of Big Data is Growing Exponentially: Do You Have "Who" it Takes?
Today, business is being transformed by leveraging big data. It is much more than just analytics. There is a multitude of competitive advantages for leveraging big data, which includes your internal data, syndicated, social media and demographic/psychographic data. Let us start with a definition of big data.
Big data can be defined in to three categories:
If they find an insight, is it relevant to their company, and maybe more importantly, is it actionable? Can their company, when provided this information in a timely manner, change the business processes to take advantage of the insights?
Some of this black data can be enabled to improve the efficiencies of the entity. There are ways to ensure that the data (embed Master Data Tagging as an example) you need is already available, but you have to plan for it to be there –trying to fix “garbage in and garbage out.” This takes people to design, and people to invoke the technology and the information. We are well and truly on the path to enabling machine learning, managing semi-structured data, massive parallelism of data, social texts and geo-spacial data, but we need to find and train people to know how to do this. The world is about connected intelligence and a demand for access to more information.
Data scientists are scarce, and many of them lack the business savvy and/or business intelligence capability required. Universities around the world have started to offer different kinds of graduate programs in data science. For example, New York University is offering a Master in Data Science. But where will they learn the business knowledge?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger discussed in the WSJ CIO article on September 25, 2014, the difference between the Data Analyst and the Data Scientist. It’s the difference between explaining why something happened and predicting what is going to happen. Obviously, the latter is more important in the fast-moving world of consumer spending and commercialism. Furthermore, Irving comments in the WSJ CIO article that executives need the human touch to be able to provide managers throughout the business with the tools, information and autonomy to make the decisions. Thus, making them better leaders.
We have being trying to analyze our customers’ propensity to buy something, and in the good old days there were only three or four models that didn’t change very often. Today however, Cisco creates approximately 30,000 models a year. This is tremendous modeling capability, but the challenge is how to integrate it to find anomaly-oriented information that is multi-structured, constant streaming data with answers in real time?
Some arenas are becoming even more sensitive to the time and processing of data. Let’s look at Digital Marketing ads which are being placed within tenths of milliseconds. The user profile is evaluated and the right ad is placed. Many decisions are being taken out of the hands of individuals and placed into the computing systems that we are evoking. But who programs the systems? Who is smart enough?
Senior management champions of big data analytics and insights are the most critical to all businesses. Without them, companies will be doomed. Their competitors will be able to flank them with ease and show-up in places that they did not predict. In fact, our customers are now moving to companies that help them learn and understand what is happening in their businesses, not just your own.
Who is doing well? Those that use and understand the data will become the future leaders of all companies. To understand what happened and why it happened is old school... what is going to happen and what you are going to do about it is where the leadership will be critical.
GE is spending billions of dollars on servicing all of their products... and is hiring 1,000 programmers and data scientists in California, to create and analyze this transformation in their business models. Ford Motor Company has a center for analytics to examine all of the data from their cars and dealerships, to predict the future needs of consumers. LinkedIn is helping find the most influential buyers within companies and they are saying that the people that use the data are 25 percent more effective.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony van der Hoek has had an 18-year career with the Coca-Cola Company, developing and leveraging their Big Data and advanced analytics with large global customers (Walmart, 7-Eleven and McDonald’s to name a few). In 2013, he was recognized by Consumer Goods Technology as one of their industries Visionaries. Today, van der Hoek has now entered the entrepreneurial space by being a Coach Mentor at one of Atlanta’s premier incubators the Atlanta Tech Village. In addition to consulting, van der Hoek is pioneering work with start-up companies in the BI space for sustainability, and daily deals aggregation. Visit www.hoeksinternational.com for more information.
Big data can be defined in to three categories:
- Big Data: that mass of data that is everything in the universe which accumulates daily and is brontobytes of data.
- Dark Data: that data which is relevant to your company and business, but difficult to get to.
- Black Data: this is combined dark data that provides actionable business relevant insights.
If they find an insight, is it relevant to their company, and maybe more importantly, is it actionable? Can their company, when provided this information in a timely manner, change the business processes to take advantage of the insights?
Some of this black data can be enabled to improve the efficiencies of the entity. There are ways to ensure that the data (embed Master Data Tagging as an example) you need is already available, but you have to plan for it to be there –trying to fix “garbage in and garbage out.” This takes people to design, and people to invoke the technology and the information. We are well and truly on the path to enabling machine learning, managing semi-structured data, massive parallelism of data, social texts and geo-spacial data, but we need to find and train people to know how to do this. The world is about connected intelligence and a demand for access to more information.
Data scientists are scarce, and many of them lack the business savvy and/or business intelligence capability required. Universities around the world have started to offer different kinds of graduate programs in data science. For example, New York University is offering a Master in Data Science. But where will they learn the business knowledge?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger discussed in the WSJ CIO article on September 25, 2014, the difference between the Data Analyst and the Data Scientist. It’s the difference between explaining why something happened and predicting what is going to happen. Obviously, the latter is more important in the fast-moving world of consumer spending and commercialism. Furthermore, Irving comments in the WSJ CIO article that executives need the human touch to be able to provide managers throughout the business with the tools, information and autonomy to make the decisions. Thus, making them better leaders.
We have being trying to analyze our customers’ propensity to buy something, and in the good old days there were only three or four models that didn’t change very often. Today however, Cisco creates approximately 30,000 models a year. This is tremendous modeling capability, but the challenge is how to integrate it to find anomaly-oriented information that is multi-structured, constant streaming data with answers in real time?
Some arenas are becoming even more sensitive to the time and processing of data. Let’s look at Digital Marketing ads which are being placed within tenths of milliseconds. The user profile is evaluated and the right ad is placed. Many decisions are being taken out of the hands of individuals and placed into the computing systems that we are evoking. But who programs the systems? Who is smart enough?
Senior management champions of big data analytics and insights are the most critical to all businesses. Without them, companies will be doomed. Their competitors will be able to flank them with ease and show-up in places that they did not predict. In fact, our customers are now moving to companies that help them learn and understand what is happening in their businesses, not just your own.
Who is doing well? Those that use and understand the data will become the future leaders of all companies. To understand what happened and why it happened is old school... what is going to happen and what you are going to do about it is where the leadership will be critical.
GE is spending billions of dollars on servicing all of their products... and is hiring 1,000 programmers and data scientists in California, to create and analyze this transformation in their business models. Ford Motor Company has a center for analytics to examine all of the data from their cars and dealerships, to predict the future needs of consumers. LinkedIn is helping find the most influential buyers within companies and they are saying that the people that use the data are 25 percent more effective.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony van der Hoek has had an 18-year career with the Coca-Cola Company, developing and leveraging their Big Data and advanced analytics with large global customers (Walmart, 7-Eleven and McDonald’s to name a few). In 2013, he was recognized by Consumer Goods Technology as one of their industries Visionaries. Today, van der Hoek has now entered the entrepreneurial space by being a Coach Mentor at one of Atlanta’s premier incubators the Atlanta Tech Village. In addition to consulting, van der Hoek is pioneering work with start-up companies in the BI space for sustainability, and daily deals aggregation. Visit www.hoeksinternational.com for more information.