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Taming Big Data Challenges

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DQI Bureau
New Update

In PwC's 5th Annual Digital IQ Survey, 62% of information technology and business executives surveyed by PwC believe that big data has significant potential to create business advantage. In India, over the past decade, organizations have matured their information systems and the leaders have deployed applications which support the decision making through reports, dashboards, monitoring, and advanced analytics. However, primary data source remains to be structured data source.

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The term ‘big data' encompasses structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information created inside a company or available for sale by commercial data aggregators and for free by governments-from demographic and psychographic information about consumers to product reviews and commentary; blogs; content on social media sites; and data streamed 24/7 from mobile devices, sensors, and tech-enabled devices.

The challenge ahead for many Indian organizations is to find the right use cases, select appropriate platforms, and derive RoI to help differentiate them in both local and global marketplace. Table 1 illustrates examples of the big data use cases in some key industries.

QUESTION FACING MANY ORGANIZATIONS IS ‘WHERE TO START'?

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In our view, an effective way to launch the initiative is with a pilot. It is also critical to appreciate that while IT plays an important role in driving the initiative, big data is a platform for business to conceive and develop ideas. This collaboration between IT and business should start at the conception stage and maintain steady engagement till results are achieved. The following framework provides a systematic way of identifying the use case for piloting a big data initiative:

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To illustrate the above framework through an example, if an organization is considering big data to improve customer engagement across its channels, it could begin by asking ‘what if...' type questions,

  • What if we can know of our customers' expectations by analyzing feedback on social media and blogs, their calls to our customer care and link it back to their interaction history with our organization?
  • What if we can know about changes in our customer's lifestage events or mobility patterns and customise our services and/or additional products to them?
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A possible big data approach then would be to:

  • Leverage big data technologies to extract unstructured information from call centres and merge it with social and online data.
  • Use big data distribution technologies to integrate existing data sources with these new data sources.
  • Perform predictive analytics to determine product and channel preferences.

Benefits for the organization would include:

  • Greater engagement with customer leading to higher wallet share, client references, and loyalty.
  • Customer profiles would be more complete aiding micro-segmentation and better risk decisions.

Big data may not be the solution for every business problem, hence the rigour needs to be applied for justifying the business case.

Interlocking the structured data analytics (EDW) along with big data environment will be the key to identify pragmatic business insights.

Hence big data initiative is not a replacement of current BI platform, but is to be looked at as a complementary initiative to existing BI investments. It is also critical to build the right team including data scientists who can identify, drive and sustain relevant use cases of big data to deliver value to the business.

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