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Business Intelligence: Big Hopes for Big Data
Big Data is the rage. But exactly what are people going to use it for?
A recent survey by The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) and reported in ComputerWorld by Jaikumar Vijayan categorized some of the most common ways people are planning to apply Big Data technologies:
- 60 percent think that Big Data can help them better utilize Social Media for marketing
- 45 percent think that Big Data will improve business insights
- 38 percent think that Big Media will help improve their sales and marketing efforts
The report found that Big Data projects are typically include a strong emphasis on data visualization. Big Data by definition refers to the processing of very large data sets, and can range to terabyte and petabyte scale. Technology has evolved to enable complex processing of massive amounts of information, but more than just processing, the ability to visualize complex data relationships has become a major element for what motivates people to pursue Big Data. Visualization is often the element which makes Big Data compelling.
Phillip Russom, research director at TDWI, said that “Big data used to be a technical problem when companies were struggling to deal with the management of large volumes of data. Now, if you apply analytics to it, there is a lot that can be gained from big data, that you could not get from traditional BI and data warehousing technologies.”
Russom identifies machine sensor data, social media, call centers, RFID chips, and supply chain and logistics applications as some of the many sources of data now being tapped into by Big Data.
Echoing the conclusion of a report on Big Data by McKinsey, TDWI found that the biggest roadblock organizations are experiencing with Big Data is a shortage of professionals that have the right skills and background to be able to effectively use it.
