Big Data MBA

Chapter 15Stories

Everyone loves stories to which they can relate, which probably makes it the ideal way to conclude this book. While stories can be fun and funny, the most valuable stories are those that motivate us to think differently and take action, where the story is so compelling that the reader can't wait to put the ideas into action!

The goals of this chapter are to share some big data stories and to help you, the reader, develop inspiring stories that are relevant to your organization and motivate the organization into action.

Instead of providing a long list of the different analytics that are occurring within different industries, I'm offering a “think differently” approach for how you find and construct big data stories that are the most relevant to your organization. Instead of looking at the big data stories from the traditional industries perspective, let's look at stories from the perspective of the organization's strategic nouns, or key business entities. I find that most big data and data science stories fall into three categories of business entity analytics (regardless of industry):

• Customer and employee analytics
• Product and device analytics
• Network and operational analytics

The advantage of looking for stories across these three categories is that it prevents organizations from artificially limiting themselves in searching for relevant big data stories. Many organizations are only interested in hearing about big data stories that are happening within ...