According to a lot of experts and IT managers, while big data holds a lot of promise and potential, the main concern with the collection of massive volumes of data from various sources is how to use it for new business purposes.
IT vendors and industry experts frequently talk about the massive business potential of blending conventional structured data with unstructured data from mobile devices, social media channels, cloud, and various other sources but the truth is business executives rarely have a clear idea on what to do with big data or how they can convey their requirements to IT.
You Need To Make Them Understand
It’s a common scene for advertising agencies, web development companies, and research companies to argue with business owners on the importance of collecting data from their consumers. It’s hard to juice out cash out from these companies so they could set up a sophisticated system that would collect data.
The sad fact is that it is really not about what they should collect, it is about what the data is for. When someone gives them an explanation, it is always given to them in a conceptual way, theoretical even and almost no mathematical support.
Business leaders are usually asked to walk blind when it comes to IT. They are asked to have faith and be comfortable in knowing that they don’t know a lot. It’s a lot to ask from people who live and breath numbers.
Not That There Is Nobody Supporting It
These past few years, startup companies are finding it easier to get financing. The success of companies like Facebook made many venture capital firms and private investors realize that there is potential in the digital world.
This is encouraging many developers to develop tools that make it easy for companies to mine data from various parts of the net, such as social media, audio and video files, weblogs, clickstreams, and even new microblogging sites such as Tumblr and Twitter. There is no problem at all with regards to using the technology. Instead, the big problem lies in finding business value from all the data that they have collected.
Right now, the biggest challenge in using big data is trying to get business people to take the time to explain what they really want out of the large amount of unstructured and structured data available at enterprises’ data these days. The IT people are by no means without fault, since they are also to blame for not being able to explain well what value businesses can derive from big data. A lot of IT organizations have steered clear of big data not because they don’t know how to, but rather, they don’t know what to do with the data after they manage to collect them.
A recent survey by market research firm TheInfoPro further emphasizes the need to find business value out of big data, as 255 IT professionals that were surveyed admitted that the companies they worked for had no big data plans because they were unable to find a specific business case for using big data.
