Big Data

Big Data and Business Insight

Big Data initiatives are launched with the goal of obtaining actionable insights from data that can boost business performance. Like any other programme, Big Data initiatives will fail unless there is a clear business strategy. Business needs must be identified and clearly articulated with a corresponding capability-driven transformation roadmap designed for Big Data initiatives to be successful. Anticipated outcomes must be explicitly outlined in the business case for the challenges your business needs to address.

While organisations are making progress on big data initiatives, much work remains to be done to operationalise the results of these projects. From a business standpoint, executives’ top priorities are to standardise, automate and ensure governance of data.

 

Exploring big data solution  

Big data is about the value that can be extracted from the data, the information and knowledge provided by the data stored – it is about the meaning derived from data. It requires a tightly coordinated and integrated ecosystem of data exploration, acquisition, storage, processing, transformation, loading and insight. It is a way of harvesting raw data from multiple, distinct data sources (internal & external), processing and aggregating the data for use by upstream/frontend applications.

These applications include business services and applications like customer relationship management systems, web applications and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

 

What is Big data? 

Information technology focuses on how we use technology to drive business changes, address business challenges and solve problems. Big data is an IT innovation that is becoming more popular across industries and organisations. Big data is used by organisations wishing to innovate their business model, to create an intelligence-driven organisation.

Intelligence requires data in different formats and types, sourced internally and externally. Creating an intelligence-driven organisation helps solves business problems.

 

How does Big data solve business problems? 

Popular social media platform such as Facebook on average store over 2,000 data points of their customers. These data points may be values of income, wealth, age of individual, number of dependents, nationality and health records.

Organisations create, store and analyse historical and new customer data every day, paying attention to customer behavioural patterns. Additionally, new data is generated from social media apps, click stream data from digital channels and data streamed to the cloud via Connected devices through IoT platforms.

The volume of data created or exchanged across data platforms is larger than ever, coming in at an increasing rate and in many different formats. Data is a strategic asset of all businesses and the business value in the data comes from the meaning and information we can harvest from it. The challenge that most organisations face is their ability to proactively derive business value from the organisation data sources i.e., upstream and downstream systems, data warehouse or data lake.

Let us examine the key Big data elements namely Data Volume, Data Velocity and Data Variety.

 

The key Big data elements? 

For businesses to benefit from Big data, they require the capability to manage data volume, integrate data sets to provide insight for their knowledgebase, manage speed and direction at which data comes in, data integration and manage the different formats of data from different data sources (internal and external).

We breakdown the term Big Data using the three Vs – Velocity, Volume and Variety. They are key to understanding how Big data is analysed.

 

Data Velocity 

The speed, frequency, latency and sources from which data comes into the organisation is increasing due to new collaboration policy (regulatory and contract) and partnership with other organisations, advances and innovation in network technology. This inflow of data into the organisation is coming in faster than we can make sense out of it or process it.

The faster the influx, the more challenging it is to derive meaningful information from the data. Most organisations data or information management capabilities do not have the bandwidth to manage and process such volumes.

 

Data Volume 

Big data is about volume and data volumes can reach unprecedented heights in no time. It is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created each day which highlights an increase of 300 times from 2005. Organisations, businesses and people are more connected than ever before and this interconnectedness leads to more internal and external data sources integration, resulting in an amount of data that is larger and constantly growing.

This increased volume of data requires a scalable computing platform to load, processes and store data for business insight and analytics. Traditional computing platforms do not have the capabilities to handle and manage the volume of data that exist today.

 

Data Variety 

For most businesses to successfully operate, they rely on sharing of data and collaborate with other organisations to develop the business insight required to manage their business operations. Collaborating with partners, regulators and 3rd party requires more sources of data which means more varieties of data in different formats.

These include data from social media platforms, documents, databases, semi-structured and unstructured data, click stream data, personal data and connected devices data from IoT platforms. Different sources of data mean additional layers of processing of data to rationalise and align data before integration to drive meaningful information. Traditional computing platforms do not have the capabilities to manage these variations.

 

Big data myth 

What big data is NOT? 

In the world today, data originates from documents and IT systems. These are captured and stored in databases and managed in document management systems. These sources contribute to big data, but they are not big data.

Organisations require their operational data to be stored centrally so that they can integrate these data to provide meaningful insight and analytics.

Currently, most organisation’s data store is decentralised with different business functions and departments using one or more IT systems. Lots of data from different sources is driving Big data. For businesses to have a 360 degree view of customers, proactively manage customer assurance and fulfilment process, and derive insights from their product platform, they need to integrate data from all sources.

Big data provide organisations with these data integration capabilities. The varieties of data that are being collected today is changing, and this is driving Big data. Some of the data are structured, like traditional documents and databases but most are semi-structured, or unstructured.

 

Why use I-MORAN Consultancy for your Big Data solution? 

Do you want to make data the foundation of every decision you make? Is your business model innovative and intelligence driven? How do you get a 360 degree view of your customers, products and services? What is your approach for building business insight and analytics? How do you measure your business performance and baseline against strategic and operational KPIs?

The answers to these questions are embedded in our delivery model.

I-MORAN Consultancy helps clients harness the power of information, using patterns and trends in huge quantities of data and presenting them in ways that are more accessible and meaningful to your business.

We can help you take control of your data landscape, providing a consultancy service that will help develop and execute your data strategy, support your organisation in building technical and data capabilities to drive the business.

Our team of experts will assess your current enterprise data landscape and work with the enterprise architecture team to design and build an agile, responsive data hub that addresses the short- and long-term business goals.

We will support your organisation in achieving business value from your Big data initiatives and bring together leading data technology experts with industry expertise to help your business get better value from both internal and external data.

 

Some of the solutions we provide include: 

• Business Data Lake
• Data Migration (On Premise to Cloud)
• Data Warehouse optimisation
• Insight driven solutions

 

Our Big Data approach 

Our team of technical architects will ensure your organisation processes all the data available (internal and external), cleaning it to provide valuable insights that drive better business performance. We will deliver a cost-effective solution for managing huge volumes of data combined with the skill to deliver the right type of business insights and analytics.

The senior leadership team needs to demonstrate to the board how leveraging data enables and optimises the operating model (people, process, organisation, technology), providing greater business value. This is one of the ways they can persuade business leaders to make ongoing investments in data governance, Big Data and data management solutions.

 

Benefits of Big Data 

Increased revenue

• Improved productivity
• Improved decision making
• Improved ability to react quickly to changes in the market
• Identify and create opportunities
• Improved agility
• Improved Collaboration
• Improved customer satisfaction & retention

 

Challenges of Big Data  

• IT Budget Constraints
• Integration challenges
• Lack of technical expertise
• Data Security Concerns
• Data Silo
• Poor data quality

Understand your business

Case Study: Transforming your data landscape

We have completed many big data projects successfully, including:

• We helped a media and entertainment company on their big data and predictive analytics – data migration and data integration programme, creating new patterns for migration of product & customer data from multiple sources across the enterprise to a public cloud platform (GCP)

• We supported a public sector organisation on a data migration programme, from a legacy case management system to strategic case management system.