While enterprises are well aware of the "four Vs" of big data – volume, velocity, variety, and value – they continue to struggle with executing a strategy to address them. The reality is that doing nothing is not a choice. To become a leader, remain efficient, and become more competitive and profitable, you have to harness and leverage your big data.
Taking data across various channels, media, and languages, and then organising it all by relevant concepts, patterns, and sentiment is not easy. Yet big data can be tamed regardless of how daunting the task may originally seem, with the right tools and processes in place.
As an example, HP and NASCAR teamed up to design and build the Fan and Media Engagement Centre (FMEC) to help NASCAR track real-time media for its growing 75 million fan base and in order to be able to attend to their needs. This is essentially a real-world application that converts many bits of disparate data into relevant, profitable big data from start to finish.
Organisations need to take a step back and see how big data transforms business. A customer service call has the potential to transform an internal process, while tweets and likes can lead to a design innovation. Connected data suddenly reveals patterns and relationships, opening up new opportunities. The moment to tap the full potential of big data is now.
Integrate or perish
The solution for businesses is to integrate their new data strategy into their overall IT services strategy. There should be no excuse any more for disparate departments – from marketing to call centre, everyone should be unified with a single view for the benefit of the customer firstly, and of the business consequently.
In order to monetise data, organisations need tools that can help them separate the data that are crucial and can provide insights for business development. HP's Haven is such a tool and it does exactly that – it can 'navigate' through data and provide valuable insights for a variety of business purposes. From capacity planning to targeted advertising, data insights can help deliver different versions of an ad campaign to subscribers based on their interests and purchase histories, or analyse historical attack activity to help predict when a company is most likely to be targeted – and what action to take.
Big data will be the norm in the coming years, as the internet of things expands, embedded in everything, including the products and services companies buy and sell, changing not only the way businesses interact with customers, but the way they operate as a whole.
Holistic view
The businesses that will best utilise big data capabilities will effectively take the lead by transforming the relevant insights into informed business decisions. Data quality is a big part of big data management, so the first step toward this approach would be to map all data in order to better understand what exists and what is needed. The next step of analytics is predictive maintenance; information governance is key to unlock all organisational potential.
Crucially, the key to unlocking big data is looking at the holistic capabilities of it. The big data journey is a long one, but with the right tools and processes in place, the vast amounts of information that our new social and technological being has created can be harnessed and used for great good.
- Mateen Greenway is Chief Technologist for the HP Public Sector.
