I’ve heard a few comments on how the term “Big Data” is going by the wayside. That it has become merely a marketing term, similar to “the cloud”, and really does not help the business at all. It only creates more noise and leads people down a never ending path. So we should kill Big Data…or should we?
The truth of the matter is that we have had “Big Data” for many years. Thousands of petabytes of data coming from ERP, CRM, billing, hospital, manufacturing, and countless other sources. Today we have many more sources thanks to Web 2.0 – website information, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Bringing it all in one place is a challenge in and of itself, but not insurmountable. The big problem lies in finding the needle in the haystack of data – the one that can actually answer a key business question and help you move your business forward.
Sure there are many tools to do that for you – marketing automation, Hadoop, enterprise BI, and so on – but using them properly is still somewhat of an art that requires both statistical knowledge and business savvy experience. Those skill sets are far and few between today, leading the very same people in the trenches to attempt these finds and not be 100% successful at driving actionable results.
But you can breathe life into your Big Data project by ensuring the right resources work together in the cause. You need to pair your math geeks with your software engineers as well as your business experts. Services such as Chateaux’s Decision Sciences and Analytics service are complimentary to your technology investments, and have helped companies with these answers in areas such as marketing intelligence, customer intelligence, and supply chain intelligence.
The combination of technology with select resources can and will identify the results you are looking for, and ultimately create actionable analytics that drive decisions. This is the key to livening up your Big Data investments.
