Bigdata – The latest art in decision making

 What is Bigdata?

Big Data is a large pool of data that is brought together and analyzed to distinguish patterns and make better decisions. These analyzed patterns become the basis of competition and growth for individual firms, enhancing productivity and creating significant value for the quality of products and services.

The True Nature of Big Data

Big Data represents a revolutionary step forward from traditional data analysis, characterized by its four main elements: variety, volume, velocity and Value.

The variety of data comes in two flavors: structured and unstructured. Structured data enters a data warehouse already tagged and is easily sorted. The vast majority of today’s data, however, is unstructured, and fed by sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and video content. It’s random, difficult to analyze, and enormous.

The sheer volume of Big Data overwhelms the normal data warehouse. For example, Facebook reports that its users register 2.7 billion likes and comments per day. For many, this magnitude of data is intimidating: they can’t keep up with it, much less sort it, analyze it, and extract value from it.

All of that data can be challenging to manage when flooding in at a velocity that, for many players, far outpaces their processing ability. In order for Big Data to be a game changer, it needs to be analyzed at a rate that matches the blistering speed at which information enters data warehouses. In microseconds, decisions must be made as to whether a particular bit of data deserves to be captured, and whether it has relevance when combined with other data.

The truthfulness and quality of data is the most important frontier to fuel new insights and ideas. However, focus is required in order to increase the ability to make the right decisions. The value (also termed as Veracity, Variability) tells us how fast the data can be analyzed and acted upon to provide business value

Uses for big data

The vision for big data is that organizations will be able to harness relevant data and use it to make the best decisions. Technologies today not only support the collection and storage of large amounts of data, they provide the ability to understand and take advantage of its full value, which helps organizations run more efficiently and profitably. For instance, with big data and big data analytics, it is possible to:

• Mine customer data for insights that drive new strategies for customer acquisition, retention, campaign optimization and next best offers.
• Recalculate entire risk portfolios in minutes and understand future possibilities to mitigate risk.
• Generate retail coupons at the point of sale based on the customer's current and past purchases, ensuring a higher redemption rate.
• Send tailored recommendations to mobile devices at just the right time, while customers are in the right location to take advantage of offers.
• Analyze data from social media to detect new market trends and changes in demand.
• Use clickstream analysis and data mining to detect fraudulent behavior.
• Determine root causes of failures, issues and defects by investigating user sessions, network logs and machine sensors.

and more...