Big Data in business

Customer intelligence is just one example. As the technology evolves, big data will accelerate a number of important trends in business in coming times. You know there's a lot of good stuff in big data, but how can you sort out what's relevant to you from all that white noise? The key is to know what to look out for and what will be relevant to your business in a wholly business context. When looked at and used in all of the right ways, this element can for sure be seen to add good value to a business.

Big data will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of development to the process in driving a business forwards. Big data has given businesses a window into valuable streams of information from customer purchasing habits to general finance data all related to a business. Essentially, things become agents for themselves, for people and for businesses. Think of the car that alerts emergency services and an insurance company or the smart thermostat that schedules service. The added connectivity, communications and intelligence of things will make many of them agents for services that are currently requested and delivered via human intervention.

By 2017, it has been thought of that more than 30% of enterprise access to broadly based big data will be via intermediary data broker services, serving context to business decisions. Digital business demands real-time situation-awareness as things need to be known in a highly up to date and on the ball manner as and when the data is captured, no matter how this may be. This includes insights into what goes on both inside and outside the organization. How do weather patterns impact inventory? More so, how do this season’s customer preferences as expressed in social media suggest greater or lesser inventory.

The primary goal of big data analytics is to help companies make more informed business decisions by enabling data scientists, predictive modelers and other analytics professionals to analyze large volumes of transaction data, as well as other forms of data that may be untapped by conventional business intelligence (BI) programs. That could include Web server logs and Internet clickstream data, social media content and social network activity reports, text from customer emails and survey responses, mobile-phone call detail records and machine data captured by sensors connected to the Internet of Things.