Harness Big Data and Embrace Challenges and Reward

Use Big Data to Deliver Content Dedicated to your end Customer/Client

Improve your Services based on Big Data Results

Big Data is about Identifying and Analysing Trends

Big Data is a Big Deal

Undoubtedly, ‘Big Data’ gives you the power to analyse your customer/client choices and develop products and services which fit their needs.  You can also, arguably, influence their choices.  Given the right people and enterprise architecture, you can develop a user driven business.  This is has obvious advantages including lower marketing costs.

For years we have taken advice from websites such as Amazon and iTunes who employ recommendation engines:  “Customers, who bought this, bought that.”  This algorithm has no doubt contributed to more sales for both giants.  This has paved the way for one of the best uses of Big Data we have seen in recent times and how it can be utilised to give subscribers what they desire.  The company that has achieved this goal is Netflix.

Using data it mined from subscribers it discovered that customers liked political dramas, especially the BBC miniseries “House of Cards”, the actor Kevin Spacey, and director David Fincher.  The result was a remake of the BBC miniseries.  The TV show has been a huge success.  It is currently in its third season since it launched in 2012. 

Netflix did not just look at popularity but trends.  And it is these trends that your architecture and algorithms has to handle to make use of Big Data, and to justify developing the resources to handle it.

Big Data Influence

Big data is being used to influence how organisations are run at almost every level of our day to day lives.  Police collate data to predict where crimes are going to take place, and allocate resources accordingly. 

Purchase history is now being linked in ways which were a pipe dream a few years ago.  Target, a company which make various lotions and beauty products predicted with some accuracy that when sales of unscented lotions increased the chances are the purchaser was pregnant.  They then targeted her with related products.

In the realm of human health, air quality and certain conditions are being linked for the first time as researchers can pull in data from a wider variety of sources. 

For your organisation the results can be just as good.  Imagine what you could do if you had algorithms capable of predicting with a high degree of accuracy the spending habits of 80% of your customers.  How much you would sell if you could influence their decisions?  Netflix have stated that 3 out of 4 customers are influenced by their recommendation engine.

Big data is not just limited to service delivery but impacts other aspects such as stock control, and the times of year when you are going to be busier.  This influences how much stock you need to hold and when you need to take on temporary staff.

Big data is active in business and public life.  Providing you have the infrastructure to collate and make sense of the data, a new world of revenue streams becomes available.  In fact your organisation might change the way it develops products and services entirely.