Whether a business organisation is just starting out or it is already a multinational, it needs valuable data and insights to make the most of its resources and operate strategically. Big Data plays a crucial role for a business to understand its target audience, customers preferences, and even anticipate their needs. For Big Data to help business organisations achieve these goals, it needs to be effectively presented and properly analysed.
What is Big Data?
Now that we now it is important for business organisations and how it can help companies achieve their goals, you might be wondering what big data is. Looking at it simplistically, Big Data is a combination of all the processes and tools used to managing large data sets. Big Data analytics in based on examining vast amounts of data to reveal hidden patterns, correlations and other insights.
The Big Data concept is possible thanks to technology, which enables organisations to analyse their data and get answers from it almost immediately. This process was much slower and less efficient with more traditional business intelligence solutions.
The Big Data concept was conceived due to the need to understand trends, preferences and patterns in the enormous database generated when people interact with different systems and each other. Therefore, Big Data allows business organisations to use analytics to figure out the most valuable customers. It also enables businesses to create new experiences, service and products.
Evolution Big Data analytics
Big Data has become increasingly popular during the past few years. It has become imperative for organisations to understand that they need to capture all the data that streams into their businesses in order to apply analytics and get significant value from it.
The concept of Big Data has been around for years, dating back to the 1950s - decades before anyone used the term big data - businesses were using basic analytics - which consisted of numbers in a spreadsheet that were analyzed manually - to reveal insights and trends.
The novelty of Big Data is that it brings speed, accuracy and efficiency to the table.While in the past a business would have gathered information, run analytics and unearthed information that could be useful for future decisiones, nwo that business can identify insights for immediate decisions. Big Data allows business to work faster and stay agile, which makes them more competitive in this day and age.
The importance of Big Data analytics
Big Data analytics has been vital for many leading companies to outperform the competition as it helps organisations harness their data and use it to identify new opportunities. In this day and age, the data generated is so vast that it needs an automated program to be able to process it effectively. Many organisations, whether they are new entrants or leading companies, depend on data-driven strategies to compete, capture and innovate. From It to healthcare, organisations in many industries are using Big Data to help them achieve their goals.
As Big Data analytics enables organisations to render their data useful and employ it to identify new opportunities, that leads to smarter business moves, more efficient operations, higher profits and happier customers.
Companies use Big Data for many reasons. First of all, they use it to reduce costs when it comes to storing large amounts of data and identifying more efficient ways of doing business. With the speed of Hadoop and in-memory analytics along with the ability to analyze new sources of data, Big Data allows businesses to analyze information immediately and make decisions accordingly. Lastly, Big Data is important to find out customers’ needs through analytics enabling organisations to create products and devise services to satisfy customers’ needs.
Who is using Big Data?
Different type of organisations, across many industries, rely on Big Data to make quick, agile decisions and stay competitive. Here are some of the organisations that use Big Data analytics:
The leisure and travel industry depends on customers’ satisfaction to succeed. That is where Big Data comes to play an important role in this type of organisations’ operations. Companies in this industry, like hotels and casinos, have a short window of opportunity to turn things around when a customer experience goes south, before they start complaining online and damaging the organisation’s reputation, deterring others from using its services. Big Data gives these business the ability to gather customer data, analyse it and identify potential problems before it damages the organisation.
Big Data also allows the healthcare industry to effectively manage large amounts information such as patient records, health plans, insurance information and others. With this ability to analyse large amounts of information, healthcare providers can provide diagnoses or treatment options faster.