Big Data - Bigger Insights - Better Results - how can your business tap into its value?

Data is generated from every aspect of a business’s operations and is used to make decisions and improve efficiency, but there comes a point when the variety of data sources together with the volume and speed with which it is generated makes it impossible for that business to extract any value buried in that data. In this post, we explore Big Data including strategies and technologies that can help organizations extract insights from their data to drive business transformation.

The core functions around Big Data are a combination of capturing, processing, storing, blending, analyzing, and extracting insights from large and diverse datasets. These insights enable organizations to uniquely improve many aspects of their operations. Examples include, improved decision making, personalizing customer experiences, drive efficiencies, innovate new products and services – all to drive business growth.

Challenges with the magnitude of big data: Vast amounts of diverse data created at high velocity can often overwhelm IT systems causing issues in latency and significantly challenges the generation of timely insights. The additional cost and resources required to combat these challenges are often difficult to justify as organizations cannot predict the value of insights generated.

Opportunities for business: But the opportunities for organizations that persevere are immense especially when blended with external streams of information. The volume allows organizations to obtain insights beyond the edge of their operational envelope; the velocity allows them to detect and respond to emerging opportunities, anomalies, and sentiment in real-time. Add to this ability of advanced analytic techniques to decipher speech, sentiment, images, add context and predict extrapolated outcomes ... we then start to create pro-active insights for everything from product innovation to risk mitigation.

Big Data Analytics can improve decision making in ANY business function within ANY industry. Too many to list here... But here are a couple of cool ideas you may not have heard of:

• Precision Farming: Farming, often seen as a laggard in the Tech age, now employ Big Data analytics to optimize crop yields and resource utilization. By integrating and analyzing data from satellite imagery, weather forecasts, soil sensors, and crop health sensors, to make data-driven decisions about irrigation, fertilization, and pest control, farmers have managed to dramatically increase productivity, minimize wastage while improving sustainability.
• Predictive Healthcare Devices: Wearable devices that leverage Big Data analytics and AI algorithms to predict and prevent diseases. By analyzing patient vitals in real-time, combining this with the patients’ medical history, genetic information, medical imaging scans, these AI bots can identify early signs of health problems, recommend personalized and preventative treatments before the inception of any disease. A far cry from treating the symptoms post the onset of the disease.

• Deploy a Big Data Context Driven Platform like mLogica’s CAP*M to create a single version of the truth for corporate data
• Augment current operational data with streaming information from external sources like social media, IoT devices, CCTV and on-line transactions
• Blend and enrich data for context, sentiment and real-time developments
• Deploy AI based advanced analytics to extract insights, patterns, outliers and predictive outcomes for better decision making, innovation and risk mitigation.
• Provide mobile reporting and analytics personalized to key stakeholders and their decision makers
• Finally deploy robust data governance protocols to ensure security, legitimate access, regulatory compliance and audit

• Create a data-Driven enterprise: First and foremost, invest in AI powered analytics and train your staff in their use and benefits to promote a data driven enterprise
• Deeper look: Take a deeper holistic look at the data in your organization, look to break down your data silos and envision your enterprise data working together
• Lead by example. Use data as an essential part of decision making from the boardroom down
• Ditch traditional ROI equations for “what could we achieve if we could...”. It frees innovative thinking, drives experimentation, enhances progress by iteration and makes the organization agile to respond to dynamic market shifts and new ideas

Big data provides a significant opportunity for organizations to gain a competitive edge by driving innovation, improving decision making, enhancing customer experience and increasing efficiencies. However, careful planning and execution are crucial to ensure your data drives innovation and growth, rather than hindering it. mLogica can help! Our big data complex event analytics platform and AI driven processes help organizations successfully extract measurable value from their massive data-intensive use cases, efficiently and cost effectively.