The Big Strategic Opportunity

Ability to draw intelligence from their data: This is the most pressing factor that concerns 67% of the 226 IT executives that Oracle surveyed in 2014. Surprisingly, 29% of the executives rate their organizational preparedness as poor to handle the data deluge.

The 5 key inhibitors, for executives and organizations alike, are:

1. Is there really any substance in this Big Data thing?

Or is it just the hype? Definitely, there is a lot of hype around Big Data solutions. You can just browse through the 100s of twitter hash tags. The top 10 are displayed below.

There are two problems when something gathers noise. Either noise is assumed as real signal or the hype buries the real signal within the noise.

We take an informed position that Big Data does offer tremendous potential for solving business problems.

Fast Company released its list of 2015’s Top 10 companies using Big Data solutions.

Catapult, a health-analytics and wearable sensors manufacturing company having offices in USA, Australia and UK provides athlete health monitoring devices; devices that leverage the Big Data architecture and technologies.

Mark43 is another example. An incident and accident reporting app (based on a cloud-based records management and analytics system) used by cops to make policing smarter. The app cuts down the average time for reporting fatalities and incidents. You can view the complete list of these innovative companies here.

This brings us to the conclusion that Big Data is not hype; it has substance and early adopters are already using Big Data solutions for product and service innovation.

2. Does it require Large Sums of Up-front Capital?

Perceptions about infrastructure and advanced analytics costs are based on hearsay and hardly rationalized according to the perceiver’s enterprise size and requirement. Technological gap, data awareness and upfront costs are a concern but not one that should prevent enterprises from exploring and incrementally adopting Big Data solutions.  

3. Do our Competitors use Big Data to drive Business Value?

Jeff Bozos, the celebrity CEO of Amazon recently gave an interview and opined that businesses should think 10 years down the line. Lowering the cost of business intelligence for driving business value will never harm your business in the long-run.

4. Do We Have a Problem that requires Big Data Solution?

If the data that your company gathers or manages is increasing in variety, volume and velocity, you may think of exploring the Big Data solutions. If a firm’s current IT infrastructure cannot handle the 3Vs of data, or any one of them, the situation calls for a Big Data solution. Gaining situational awareness has becomes the cornerstone of driving business value; this is what Big Data solutions promise.

5 . Where is the Business Value?

Informed decision making, optimization, automation, marketing, operations, product/service innovation, data monetization and the list goes on. Pick one area and explore the options, experiment, iterate and improve. Get hold of an expert in the field and you start experiencing the difference.

Business value often comes by combining different and disparate data sets previously thought as irrelevant. The job is to find where the connection lies.

Use cases for each industry are different for implementing Big Data and IoT solutions. There are be 100s of success stories (and unsuccessful also) that utilized Big Data as a solution to unlock the business value. We recently implemented an IoT solution leveraging the big telematics data. You can read the case study here. A beautifully designed Infographic that details key benefits of Big Data solutions can be found at the Entrepreneur website.

Your thoughts and opinions are welcome. In the next post, I will highlight the key challenges related to vision & strategy when adopting a Big Data solution in various industry use cases.