Got Big Data? Big Deal!

Having access to Big Data is no longer enough for Enterprise Success

We have become incredibly affective at gathering transactional information about what we do in our daily digital lives. Data, lots of data, an “explosion” of data is created every day, just by doing what we do.

Those activities all become data points somewhere. Use a mobile phone – data is created, swipe your credit card – more data is created, send an email, write a Tweet, post on Facebook, visit a website and you’re creating data.

And this data is reaching mind-numbing proportions, with social media posts and other seemingly trivial entries becoming a daily storm of digital data. This is the Big Data you hear so much about today.

But this raw information is just that – raw information and huge amounts of it. It has no form. It has no substance and certainly, in and of itself, it has no value.  As marketing and business professionals, we find ourselves literally swimming in a sea of data – Big Data – and yet can’t seem to find a drop to “drink”.

The trick is how to uncover that value – to make sense out of the numerous tweets, Facebook posts, and other bits of social and organic information we generate each day. Data is, after all, only useful if you can turn it first into knowledge and then into action.

Originally the challenge was to get data. OK, we have the data, now what?

It is no longer enough for a business to simply manage this data. It is now a pure business imperative to use the data, apply the knowledge and gain customer and market insights, quickly and cost affectively – to gain market advantage.

Big Data Analysis is the Business Imperative of the New Year

This explosion of Big Data has created an enormous opportunity. For most, the sheer volume and velocity of this Big Data makes it hard if not impossible for them to see that opportunity. For many, this opportunity has turned into a form of paralysis – Data Analytics Paralytic Syndrome.

The data is there but the insights are missing

It is critical to realize that buried in all of this data are insights that could potentially move your business. Somewhere in there is knowledge that can allow you to deepen your customer relationships, better predict customer needs and improve your bottom line. It’s a matter of being able to see those buried insights.

But to arrive at this knowledge means that somehow, you need to put the data in context with your business realities, to create actionable intelligence. Now that you have Big Data, you need Big Data Analysis.

For this data to have any measure of value to your business, it needs to help you

• Spot critical trends
• Detect anomalies
• Put your Big Data in context with the world and your customers’ actions
• Model, test, and add predictive insight to your business

It may not be so easy to create business or marketing value out of seemingly disparate and meaningless statistical minutia. However, Big Data analytics has begun to prove itself to have the potential to plow through the enormous mountain of Facebook, Twitter and numerous other worlds of social, business and financial interaction data. After all, Big Data analytics is all about mining information from huge piles of data.

So, having Big Data is no longer enough. Congratulate yourself if you have reached that point, but now you need to ask yourself how you are going to use that data to become a better business.

You need to take that data and begin to use, turn it in to Actionable Intelligence that can help your businesses and to make better decisions about how to reach and serve your customers. The business mandate for this New Year is to begin to systematically turn your organization’s Big Data into a competitive advantage.

There’s vast, untapped potential inside your data. Now go get it!