Recently while driving, I was listening to a talk show radio when an advertisement caught my attention. It was touting “Big Data” platform to small business owners. When did you last hear a radio ad for something as complex as Big Data? Is it just a passing fad?

We all know that most organizations have been grappling with basic data integration issues to bring together data from desperate operational systems to glean intelligence about their business i.e. customer behavior, product failure or defect ratio. In fact IT departments are under so much pressure that they are unable to cope up with the pressure leading to business areas buying off the shelf or building localized data management solutions further compounding the data integration woes.

With all the claims of Big data organizations, some organizations are really wondering if the magic wand to solve their data integration is finally here.

High return on investments in business intelligence really comes from the actionable intelligence that can be weaved into strategic and day to day operations of an organization. The following graph shows return on high return on investment for organizations that leverage analytics for their internal (tactical and strategic decision making) and external processes (i.e. supply chain analytic with partners)

This actionable intelligence really comes from predictive data models using data mining algorithms against data in traditional data warehouses or data marts. There are a few challenges with this scenario:

The best and biggest data warehouses contain only a fraction of the data being generated in an organization.

With the advent of new generation of connected devices, sensors, organizations are generating more data than ever. In most cases this data never makes it to the analytics environment

Source: Nucleus Research

Organizations create tremendous amount of unstructured data in the form text, audio and video from social media, documents, emails, smart phones etc. As per some industry estimates, unstructured data constitutes about 80% of total data being generated.

The implication of the three challenges mentioned above is that organizations have been using only a tiny fraction of the data they generate to create the actionable intelligence as a competitive advantage tool.

Big Data and associated advanced technologies can help organizations leverage the vast amounts of streaming and unstructured data along with structured data to get complete picture of the business o as to prevent product failure or reducing customer churn.

However most organizations are feeling overwhelmed when it comes to leveraging the Big data technology and platforms. With so many vendors popping up across the spectrum of Big data that they are feeling lost. Key challenges being faced are:

Where can they most effectively use and get high ROI? What technology or platform will work for them? How can the new platform align with their existing investments? Is Big Data really Schema less? Should they forget about 30 years of experience with relational

data models?

In the next few blogs we’ll address each of these questions to help clear the air for organizations to leverage Big Data to gain insights they have never had before.