There is a famous Chinese phrase, which says “May you live in interesting times.” We are indeed living in interesting times full of opportunities and possibilities for individuals and businesses, alike.
Only a few years ago, the ability to have access to information or data across an enterprise was the challenge. Leaders across the board struggled to make decisions in the absence of real time information. Then came the era of mid 90s , where Enterprise Applications like MRPs (Material Resource Planning ), ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning), SCM (Supply Chain Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and many more, started to mature and brought about revolution in computing systems in an organization.
It gave a phenomenal power to our next gen leaders to take optimal and prompt decisions. Decision makers started to harness effectively actionable intelligence to gain a competitive advantage. Actionable intelligence promises to level the playing field among profit seeking enterprises, regardless of size.
Then towards the start of twenty first century, there came a revolution of social media. With explosion of technology and the Internet, myriad wonder applications like Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Imo, Instagram and many more were born. It has been recorded by IBM that the world has generated almost 90% of the total data on the planet, in the last two years only.
Big Data is the heart of smart revolution. It is an off shoot of such innovative ideas born out of mad rush of data explosion, especially the unstructured one (like email conversations, social media posts, video contents, photos, voice recordings, sounds etc). It is already transforming the way we live, find love, cure cancer, improve performance, conduct science, run smarter cities and countries and operate our business.
Big data complement our traditional transaction data with social inputs ( though a heavy unstructured in nature ) . It is new way of understanding our Products , our operations, our Business Partners ( Customers, Suppliers, Employers, Employees, Contractors, Business Associates) and whosoever is directly or indirectly linked to an entity.
Social Savvy people are not only talking or chatting, but sharing their inputs by way of recommendations, ideas, liking or disliking, about anything and everything under the sun, that is helping one understand a business style, product impact, customers preferences, business associate needs, partner expectations etc in a much detailed way.
You cannot ignore such a socially active class of audience (now in majority), if one is looking for future growth and sustenance at higher projectile. To suggest an idea, now Text Mining / Social Analytics Algorithms, can bring out deeper understanding in chatting (both formal and informal) happening across multi-platforms of social media. Those briefings can change the way as how we understand our business, its sensitivity and competitive environment. Whosoever plunges in first will definitely find of way of becoming big from small.
Get the smart questions in place
Before you even think of big data analysis, first refresh on what you really need to work out, what smart questions you need to answer that had remained un-answered. I would suggest forming a core committee comprising of sub groups like:-
1. The Purpose Advisory Group
2. The Customer Advisory Group
3. The Resource Advisory Group
4. The Operation Advisory Group
5. The Finance Advisory Group
6. The Competition and Risk Advisory Group
Knowing Where You Are and Where to Go
It is hard to ignore the potential of big data. Big data represents an inflection point in what we consider
“normal” relative to historical volumes, variety, and velocity of data. Big data and business analytics go together hand in glove. Without data, there can be no analysis. And without business analytics, big data is just a noise.
Big data is a combination of transactional data and interactive data. While technologies have mastered the art of managing volumes of transaction data, it is the interactive data that is adding variety and velocity characteristics to the ever-growing data reservoir and subsequently poses significant challenges to enterprises esp. to SMEs who are aspiring to become giant, one day.
Of late, different SMEs have responded to the call, differently. Typical sales organizations or retailers are seeking to collect as much information about their customers’ lives as possible so as to fulfill their changing needs more efficiently. Manufacturing are seeking to streamline operations. SMEs can take advantage of the data / information that has never been made available before. For example, if you run a small grocery shop you now can download the weather data from Met Office service and use it to make predictions about what you need in stock. So smaller companies can tap into big data and use to enhance its offerings.
Two Pronged Advantage for SMEs
Big Data Analytics can transform business from two different directions. First you create intelligent businesses by using the framework to examine your existing business model and use the insights to improve the way you do business. Secondly, there is also the possibility that data will eventually change your business model or lead to diversification.
Some still stand on the sidelines feeling the pressure of inaction growing with every little article they read about big data revolution. The brave (or crazy ) business leaders decide to dive in and work out what they can get access to and how they can use it. Once you know what type of data is available and have accessed that data, one need to apply analytics to extract useful insights from it that can help you, to answer your strategic questions. It starts with an attempt to ask the right business questions until the answers reach an actionable outcome.
Source: Economic Times
