The Tomorrows Enterprise And Big Data

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Over the past few years, we humans have become very much hyperconnected. With the advancement of science and technology new methods of communication or sharing information have emerged. Internet revolution or as the Forbes magazine states "The New Industrial Revolution" has transformed the way we communicate or share and store these data. New and new technologies are being developed to store these data whether it is in Hard disk, floppy, CD/DVD, pen drive or even a memory card and according to a recent article published in the journal, Nature, from the UK-based European describing researchers had stored all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a digital photo of their own lab, a PDF of the 1953 study that described the structure of DNA, and a 26-second sound clip from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, in manufactured DNA.

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Mobile device production, Cloud connectivity, industrial sensors and Internet—each of these leads to an increased flow in the amount of information. Taken together, they result in what we call as Big Data. Simply putting, Big Data is a huge amount of data that is generated through Google, twitter, Facebook, Amazon and not only these but also sensors that are used to gather information about climate, storing of videos, transaction records etc. Today, it is estimated that we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, much of which (90 percent) has been created in the last two years alone [1]. According to Pat Gelsinger, the President of EMC, an American multinational corporation that sells data storage products and services, Big Data is a $70 billion industry and growing at a rapid rate of 15% to 20% a year. [2]

How Target Uses Big Data

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An article published by Charles Duhigg, reporter at The New York Times where he explains about the use of Big Data by Target, an American retailing company and the second-largest discount retailer in the United States, behind Wal-Mart. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. They also assign each shopper a unique code known as the Guest ID number that keeps tabs on everything they buy. If a customer uses a credit card or a coupon, or fills out a survey, or mail in a refund, or calls the customer help line, or open an e-mail sent by them or visits their Web site, they record it and link it to Guest ID. In short, they want to know everything they can. The information they collect can also help them in predicting if a woman is pregnant through their "pregnancy prediction" score and accordingly send coupons timed to very specific stages of pregnancy. [3]

Big Data In Marketing

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With the increasing use of social networks like Facebook, twitter, Foursquare and search engines like Google, yahoo, bing and others millions of people share information regarding their food habits, movie they like, clothes they wear, cell phones they use, religion they belong to, people they admire, how they would like to spend their vacations, places they like and so on. These valuable data collected by marketing companies helps them in selecting, organizing and accordingly customizing their product or services to cater to the requirements of their customers easily through direct marketing.

Selecting the right candidate for your job

Selecting the right candidate for your job is not an easy task as there is always a risk of selecting the wrong person. Also there is a lot of risk involved in selling an insurance contract to persons whom a company doesn’t knows well. However, Big Data can help you in minimizing the risk to the lowest level. SocialIntel, a company which screens various information of people from their accounts in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others and provide these information to human resources department, insurance companies, corporate, and government agencies and helps them in getting a good knowledge about their prospective employee while reducing costs, time, and legal risks.

Obama and Big Data

Big data has received a good deal of credit for Barack Obama’s victory in the 2012 presidential election. An article was published on November 8, 2012 in CNN by Michael Scherer where he explains how collection storage and analyzing of huge data helped in effectively marketing of Mr. Barack Obama for the 2012 presidential election. [4]

Tomorrow's Enterprise

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Big Data promises a good future ahead for new startups especially in the field of marketing. Many retailers are already using Big Data to track the behavior of their customers. In direct marketing, companies compile large databases of personal information about potential customers and clients. These databases are often sold to other marketing conglomerates. Things like earlier purchase, address, cell number and even average income can all help shape a marketer’s profile of a potential customer. But, there is a dearth of such innovative enterprises as a recent research conducted by The Corporate Executive Board Company of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies which revealed that "the vast majority of marketers still rely too much on intuition — while the few who do use data aggressively for the most part do it badly". It also reveals that on average only 11% of the decisions marketers make when it comes to consumers is based on data, over 50% of the marketers surveyed said they rely on past experienced and/or their intuition to make decisions. [5]

Scientists are looking at Big Data as a helpful tool in medical uses like tracking of diseases, and hence a whole new field can be developed that can help in tracking and finding out the possible causes of diseases, progress of new medicine etc. in a patient. [6]

It also presents a huge lot of opportunities for data-savvy managers and also for those with trans-disciplinary abilities, such as programmers with math acumen and interpersonal skills. But, specialization is the key for success.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivier-dumon/how-the-internet-changed_b_2405006.html [1]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/11/18/emc-sitting-in-sweet-spot-of-70-billion-big-data-industry/ [2]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 [3]

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/11/07/tech/web/obama-campaign-tech-team/index.html [4]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/10/05/marketers-continue-to-struggle-big-data/ [5]

http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/01/scientists-look-future-big-data-medical-uses [6]