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BIG DATA for Business Intelligence – Big Value or Big Hype
August 23rd, 2011 Martin Allen Tags: Big Data, Exabyte, Zettabyte
Posted in CIO Agenda |
So is BIG DATA simply a new hype to get everyone writing blogs or is there real value in the proposition?
In the context of business intelligence, the key question is “What business problem is BIG DATA going to solve?” Many companies have already spent millions building data warehouses, managing data, implementing sophisticated Business Intelligence and visualisation tools. Where successful, this investment has provided businesses with the intelligence they need to make better, faster and measured decisions by presenting insight from its data.
But what if businesses need more data to solve the same business challenges or issues and keep up with or ahead of the competition? How do I get more intimate with my customers, how do I reduce costs, how do I improve margins, gain customer satisfaction, increase market share, improve top line growth? These are the same questions business leaders have used BI for in the past; the difference in the future is that there will simply unimaginable quantities of data available and necessary to make those decisions. Examples include location based information, weather, transport flow, RFID, video, social media sentiment, web click streams, log files, financial trading, loyalty schemes, news feeds, telematics, call data records, machine to machine information and much, much more. All this on top of the data companies already analyse.
IDC’s research identified that in May 2010 there was the equivalent of 1,000 Exabytes of data on the planet. 1,000 Exabytes is 1 Zettabyte. By 2020, IDC predicts there will be over 35 Zettabytes of data (equivalent to a pile of DVDs stretching half way from Earth to Mars). Another mind-boggling fact is that unstructured data is predicated to grow by 80 times per year during this period.
Successful organisations of the future will be those that provide their decision makers with the information they need to tackle the same challenges and issues. The ability to harness, analyse and gain insight will be a significant competitive advantage, so finding a way to do so quickly is key. At the same time the capacity to govern and protect data will become increasingly difficult. And it’s not just about the capture and tools needed to provision information ¿ people will be a significant differentiator. Specialists who understand how to derive business value and insight from data in will be in demand.
So CIOs are likely to face an avalanche of demand from the business community, as data becomes a key enabler to improve performance. Not only the speed of the delivery of data will increase but also the sheer change of demands will potentially overwhelm as the business realise the value this data can provide.
So I suggest BIG DATA is far from hype and ultimately, if embraced will drive shareholder or stakeholder value. The key is finding a way to deliver this in a cost effective, scalable manner without being distracted from maintaining the existing operational backbone of the organisation.
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Martin Allen
Martin has over 17 years experience in the IT industry and has been involved in helping clients harness IT solutions to drive business benefit and overcome challenges in all forms of economic climate. After nine years delivering a variety of international client projects, as both a consultant and an end user, Martin moved into a business development role where this experience and expertise helped shape ideas and solutions for the pharmaceutical, financial, CPG, professional services and electronics industries. Currently charged with leading Atos’ Business Intelligence development, Martin is supporting clients in developing a deeper insight of their business to enable better and faster decisions. The avalanche of business demand for greater market, customer and competitor information, coupled with the overwhelming growth of external, unstructured data is forcing both business and IT to re-examine how they provision that information. The BI team at Atos provides the guidance and solutions so its clients meet that challenge and capitalise on this new opportunity.
A first answer to Ashish is maybe to remind what the Big Data is about ? in Forrester definition, Big Data is the combination of 2 factors : volume above the Peta AND combination of data structured and unstructured.
In addition, I suggest we also describe the other related topics such as Real Time BI and Predictive BI through tangible business cases.
All together these 3 topics depicts a new field of opportunities for Atos.
BIG DATA is a buzz word! But Open Data is a buzz word too
I think that the major difference between BIG DATA and BI is the proximity with the “Cloud and SAAS” approach. BI is the “old” strategy: Big private databases dedicated for “business and marketing analysts”, BIG DATA is the “new” one strategy (paradigm?): Cloud database, everything is “stream” and As A Service for people who simply want to earn money.
Thanks for the feedback Ashish…perhaps a topic for the next article.
Thanks for the blog Martin. Nice start. What I would like to know is “What is that which cannot be solved with traditional BI systems?” Can we have a business case to showcase it. That would clear the clouds around Big data.