While the uproar over big data has blinded the average business owner, the crucial question that needs to be answered is what will businesses gain by investing so much capital, manpower, and effort on big data initiatives? Reserving the consequences of big data technology on the Government or Education sectors for another post, today well focus on the business.
As businesses large, medium, or smallpublic, private, or partnerships, have without exception jumped on the big data bandwagon with the hope of some magical transformation on their business processes. But really, what are the tangible benefits of this sensational technology? Is it really worth spending millions building in-house, big data infrastructures?
If you consider what businesses have succeeded in gaining post big data implementations, then here are some realized benefits as per reports:
- For large enterprises, the superior data handling and management of big data has enabled very fast processing of high volumes of varied data with data validation. This kind of superior processing with significant cost and time savings was hitherto unknown to big businesses.
- The predictive analytics part has certainly helped businesses design better products and services, create more effective sales strategies, and discover new markets.
- The social media channels combined with big data, has created more direct, more personalized customer engagements. Also customer profiling based on social data analysis has led to segmented market strategies, and customized targeting of products and services.
- Big data infrastructure and tools have helped redefine the data storage and data processing needs of business internals. A complimentary technology like Hadoop has enabled efficient storage of super-high volumes of big data and more advanced processing capabilities without any additional cost burden.
- Big data technology available on the cloud platform has suddenly opened the doors of premium technology and tools to small, cash-strapped businesses. The cloud has made it possible for small businesses to tap into the power of advanced data analytics at a fraction of the real cost. This particular technology, of course, counters the challenge of big datas capital investment.
- Big data technology has certainly enabled convergence of varied data generated in different parts of an enterprise. The central storing and concurrent processing of widely disparate data have taken data analytics to the next level.
- Big data technologys real-time capabilities have wide benefits starting from superior customer experience to industrial internet with sensor-aided data collection and processing. The industrial internet has revolutionized the way some industry sectors like transportation or energy operate.
- Big data has set out to establish the probable substitution of domain expertise with machine learning; and given the pace of advancement in this field smart machines may, very soon, make data scientists or data centers redundant!
- The marketing automation products based on big data have transformed traditional marketing practices into interactive, just-in-time promotional strategies, which has been reported to have given a serious boost to sales and business performance.
Keep thinking and you will probably stumble across more specific, case-based scenarios where big data has made a tremendous contribution to the functioning of a business.
