What is big data and how it helps companies in strategic decision making.
Mammoth size data is generated everyday – blogging sites, email, mobile text messages and personal documents. This is Big Data! Traditional methods cant be used to process this data as its far too complex, large and growing exponentially from new data sources. But it’s not just the type or amount of data that’s important, it’s what organizations do with the data that matters. Big data can be analyzed for insights that improve decisions and give confidence for making strategic business moves.
The V‘s of big data –
- Volume – Value of the data depends on its size , whether data can be termed as big data depends on the size of it. Some organizations can produce terabytes of data, while others, hundreds of petabytes. In the past, storing all that data would have been too costly – but cheaper storage using data lakes, Hadoop and the cloud have eased the burden.
- Velocity – Velocity means speed. How fast data can be generated, gathered and analyzed in big data is very crucial for businesses that require their data to flow fast so that they may make the best business decisions possible.
- Variety – Nature of data varies between structure or unstructured data. Traditional data types are structured and well suited to relational databases. With the advent of big data, data becomes a new unstructured data type. Unstructured and semi-structured data types such as text, audio, and video require additional preprocessing to derive meaning and support metadata.
- Variability – In addition to high speed and data diversity, data flow is unpredictable. Data flows change frequently and vary widely. As difficult as it is, businesses need to know when something is trending on social media and how to handle daily, seasonal, and event-driven data spikes.
- Veracity – Quality of data is very important as data comes from various sources and it’s difficult to link, match, cleanse and transform data across systems. Businesses need to connect and correlate relationships, hierarchies and multiple data linkages. Otherwise, their data can quickly spiral out of control.
How is big data beneficial to companies in taking decisions?
Helping the companies to assess if the product or service is market fit, big data with its humongous analyzed data fits right in. Analysis of massive data using big data analytics aids in forecasting trends of customer behavior, markets, prices and so on. As the data is real time it helps the companies to understand current trends and demands of the market and accordingly cater to the needs of the consumer. Being able to quickly see the current campaigns of brand awareness, qualified leads for sales and customer conversion helps marketers optimize campaigns to improve metrics and drive measurable business results. This helps the marketing team to spend less time and expense by focusing on right marketing channels and strategize accordingly, the availability of fast and real time data helps the organizations to market in an effective way. Big data helps the companies to research a lot of data that comes in varied forms of case studies, projections based on similar products and more qualitative measures such as market research studies, effectively so that companies can come up with enough sale punchlines and facts as to why a particular product would be beneficial to customer, thus increasing the sales by stating the benefits clearly to the consumer. It also helps to optimize operations, it can be used to monitor and optimize supply chains, logistics, and other operational processes. This can help companies reduce costs, improve efficiency, and increase productivity, leading to better decision-making around resource allocation and investments. By analyzing large volumes of data, companies can gain valuable insights into market trends, industry benchmarks, and competitive intelligence, helping them make strategic decisions about pricing, product positioning, and market entry.
Big data analysis can help companies better understand their customers’ behavior, preferences, and needs, enabling them to make more informed decisions about product development, marketing, and sales. Big data tools and analytics can help you collect customer feedback, pull it from head or tail, and decide what to do with it. What if customers rate your product or service highly online and generally express satisfaction, but never come back? Big data combs through their opinions and observations. to help you find out why such trends are localized to a region, sector, or demographic. Big data can be used to identify and mitigate risks in areas such as finance, cybersecurity, and compliance. By analyzing large volumes of data, companies can identify potential threats and take proactive measures to minimize risk.
Overall, big data can help companies make more informed, data-driven decisions that are based on a comprehensive understanding of their business, market, and customers. This can lead to better outcomes and a more competitive edge in today’s fast-paced business environment.