Big Data For Dummies

Chapter 20

The Importance of Big Data to Business

In This Chapter

Using big data as a business planning tool

Incorporating big data into your company’s planning process

Making business decisions with big data

Starting your big data journey

The idea of managing data to transform business is nothing new. As long as organizations have been capturing information about their business processes, their customers, their prospects, and their products, a big data problem has existed. It was simply not economical or practical for companies to be able to effectively manage all the data across their organizations. Therefore, for the past 30 years, companies have had to make compromises. Either data management professionals would have to compromise by saving only snapshots of data or they would have to create separate databases to store segments of data. Companies have tried complex work-arounds to try to integrate data together to improve business decision making. This often required programmers to develop complex programs to create the right business view of data.

The gating factors keeping ...