Big Data: the Ticket for Our Future

 

Efficient data management is no longer a matter of choice for companies. It is a duty. Because without real-time analysis of customer data and action recommendations based on predictive modelling, companies will quickly loose customers to more innovative competitors in the fast-moving digital market. And these competitors are often super innovative and fast-moving companies and many of them are start-ups, always a few steps ahead. But how can companies use their data efficiently? And where to begin?

When the world was still offline…

Let us take a step back into a non digital world. And let's take a look at how companies used to work until just recently. A company consists of different departments: Product Development, Sales, Marketing, Accounting etc. Every department is like a small micro-cosmos, working with their own goals, tasks, programs. However, when you think about it, they all actually work on the same goal: Generate profit for the company. Growth. Success. And now let me ask you: If every employee of a company works towards the same goal, shouldn't they all work together? And with the same base of information and, here we go, data? The answer is yes.

What happend during the development of company structures is that every department established their own set of data. This happened naturally along the way. I have spoken about silos before and that is exactly how the data situation in many companies still (and unfortunately) looks like these days. Product development has their own set of data and so do Sales and Marketing. In the past decade these data silos have slowly been merged but there are still gaps. And this might be one of the biggest challenges for companies to solve on their path to digitilisation.

Big Data is only the first step towards digitilization

Let's go back to today. Many companies either already work with big data or have at least started. And this is an unavoidable step when looking at the amounts of data available. Current estimates of the volume of stored data are now somewhere in the zettabyte range worldwide. And this number is continuously growing. And the need for computing capacities to process data is automatically leading to an increase in complexity.

But storage capacity and computing power are by far not the only challenges associated with the Big Data revolution. Because no less revolutionary than quantity of data and its complexity are our growing abilities to make data and information understandable and to draw conclusions from it. This ability means that there is an even greater potential for change – or as we call it disruption - in terms of both our approach to IT and our overall economy.

The ability to combine advanced statistical models and new computing techniques is of central importance for us. This is the only way to understand and use data and information resources properly. When looking at Big Data, the data itself is only the basis of what we can actually do with it. The essential part is the understanding and evaluation of the data and its translation into new processes or development of new tools. I cannot say it enough: Take care of your data! They are the ticket for our future.

Source: Jens Monsees | Linkedin.com