Big Data, Big Analytics: Emerging Business Intelligence and Analytic Trends for Today's Businesses

Chapter 2

Industry Examples of Big Data

Nothing helps us understand Big Data more than examples of how the technology and approaches is being used in the “real world.” Picking up on the concept of interdependency from Chapter 1, hopefully these examples help you think about how to apply ideas from other industries into your business.

Within this chapter you will read content that came from several thought leaders that we collected from thought leaders in subjects and industries such as Digital Marketing, Financial Services, Advertising, and Healthcare.

Digital Marketing and the Non-line World

Google’s digital marketing evangelist and author Avinash Kaushik spent the first 10 years of his professional career in the world of business intelligence, during which he actually built large multiterabyte data warehouses and the intelligence platforms. In doing so, he learned how to help companies become more competitive with data. As Kaushik explains, he had to learn some hard and valuable lessons during this time:

When I built data warehouses, one of the things we were constantly in quest of was these single sources of truth. My specialty was to work with large, complicated multinational companies and build the single source of truth in a relational database such as Oracle. The single source of truth would reply on very simplistic data from ERP and other sources.

Now in hindsight the thing I had to learn quickly is that that the big data warehouse approach does not work in the online world. ...