Big Data – Why it is important to learn and manage your data
In the vast ocean of scattered and unstructured data collected through myriad sources, Big Data Analytics promises to provide the requisite tools to gather valuable insights by discovering underlying trends and predictive patterns thus enabling them to improve progress towards organizational goals. From small business aiming to grow big to large multinational companies striving to maintain their slowly diminishing market share, Big Data is no longer the future. It is here and it’s right now! If you embrace it and excel in it – you will be able to not only defend your market position but rather exploit hidden opportunities buried deep within an enormous pile of unassuming data.
With defense and technology sectors being early adopters, e-commerce, social media companies, gaming, online travel, insurance, banking, and many more industries soon saw the great promise being offered by Big Data in exploiting the true potential in their value chain. Current high demand sectors for Big Data application include Retail and E-commerce – where customer profiling, transaction information, web browsing data, social data, geo-tracking and interrelation between these data points can unearth the underlying factors driving customer behavior and eventually result in improved targeted marketing and remarketing. Within financial services, competition is becoming fiercer each day and with customer willing to explore new avenues, big data analytics can extract the required intelligence needed to realign organizational focus towards various segments of customers. Telecom sector with its access to smartphones, internal and external data can implement innovative products and services tailored to customer preferences and also develop strategies to generate new income streams.
With exponential growth in demand, the organization found themselves short of experts that can use data scientifically and achieved required objectives. Organizations are depending upon acquiring advanced technologies, tool and harbor talent that can adapt the dynamic nature of big data learning curve. With academia and industry understanding the importance of learning Big Data, they aim to put in the right amount of resources towards learning Big Data concepts and tools and prepare a workforce equipped to tackle these challenges.
Learning Big Data is no longer just valuable but rather essential. The importance of these skills will continue to gain more traction in the future as more and more industries adopt it. Big Data helps to gain problem-solving skills using the right analytics and then communicating the same in simple terms to decision makers – this skill in a resource is extremely valuable to an organization and will continue to be in high demand in future.
Big Data overcomes assumptions using a structured approach to comprehend market conditions, understand customers better, increase organizational efficiency and result in cost saving. Applying the insights discovered by Big Data enables an organization to better strategize, focus the very implementation of strategy and at times- realign misplaced strategy due to changing internal or external dynamics. Historical data is not enough, rather the predictive modeling and this ability to adapt based on the underlying trend are paramount in modern decision making for ambitious organizations. Learning Big Data is no longer a choice but is becoming a necessity each passing day. The value proposition is obvious!
Article by Geetika Sood, Manager – IOT & Big Data-Analytics Practice, Alpha Data.