Big Data is wisdom

The amount of data in our world has been exploding and analyzing large data sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, supporting new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer satisfaction, according to research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office. Leaders in every sector will have to struggle with the effects of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers. The increasing volume and detail of information captured by enterprises, the rise of multimedia, social media, and everything on the Internet, fuels exponential growth in data for the near future. (McKinsey Global Institute, 2011)

           This amount of data is very useful for businesses that want to obtain better business pattern based on historical information, and support enterprises to make critical decisions with more ease and confidence. Although there are a few skeptics who say that big data might not be the best solution for all businesses, there is no doubt that big data’s ability to centralize data and data management can help each firm to obtain the most efficient databases constructed on business process keys, decision-making processes, and more reliable business analysis patterns. All these make it possible for businesses to achieve their goals more accurately and efficiently.

           Using big data can create value in several ways. First, big data can unlock significant value by making information transparent and usable at much higher frequencies. Second, as organizations create and store more transactional data in digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything dealing with product records, show flexibility and boost performance. Leading companies are using data collection and analysis to conduct controlled experiments to make better management decisions; others are using data for basic low-frequency forecasting to high-frequency forecasting to adjust their business levels, achieving this within an adequate timeline. Third, big data provides information about a minority of customers and their needs, so the firms can manage their specific services and products accordingly. Fourth, sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision-making. Finally, big data can be used to improve the development of the next generation of products and services. (B. Marr, 2013)

           All mentioned reasons push businesses to use big data. Demands for semi-structured and unstructured big data, data warehouse and data marts, Hadoop, in-memory computing and other analytical platforms are increasing. This level of demand also has a direct impact on analytical tools and has provided a positive potential for their improvement. Today we have access to more updated and different tools to analysis our gathered information. For instance, online analytical processing, data mining, text mining and web mining provide us better ways to extract our desired information from our data pools.

           On the other hand, there are some downsides for big data as well. Policies related to privacy, security, intellectual property, and even liability will need to be addressed in a big data world. Organizations need to not only put the right talent and technology in place but also structure workflows and motivations to optimize the use of big data. Access to data is critical. Companies will increasingly need to integrate information from multiple data sources, often from third parties, and the incentives have to be in place to enable this.

           To sum up the whole story, big data is an awesome way to change our world. We can simply say that big data has brought the future to us. It does not matter what kind of businesses we manage or what kind of organization we try to establish, having access to big data is the way we must trust to achieve our planned goals.

 REFERENCES:

• Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity | McKinsey & Company. (n.d.). Retrieved February 17, 2014, from http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation
• IBM Big Data – What is Big Data – United States. (2014, January 23). ct000. Retrieved February 17, 2014, from http://www.ibm.com/big-data/us/en/
• IBM Cloud Computing: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - United States. (2014, January 30). CT054. Retrieved February 17, 2014, from http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/iaas.html
• The Awesome Ways Big Data Is Used Today To Change Our World. (n.d.). Retrieved February 17, 2014, from http://www.garudax.id/today/post/article/20131113065157-64875646-the-awesome-ways-big-data-is-used-today-to-change-our-world
• What is Big Data? (2013). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlaJsseTgk4&feature=youtube_gdata_player