Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business

Introduction

Big data is today's technology hot topic. Such technology hot topics come around every four to five years and become the “must have” technologies that will lead organizations to the promised land—the “silver bullet” that solves all of our technology deficiencies and woes. Organizations fight through the confusion and hyperbole that radiate from vendors and analysts alike to grasp what the technology can and cannot do. In some cases, they successfully integrate the technology into the organization's technology landscape—technologies such as relational databases, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), client-server architectures, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), data warehousing, e-commerce, Business Intelligence (BI), and open source software.

However, big data feels different, maybe because at its heart big data is not about technology as much as it's about business transformation—transforming the organization from a retrospective, batch, data constrained, monitor the business environment into a predictive, real-time, data hungry, optimize the business environment. Big data isn't about business parity or deploying the same technologies in order to be like everyone else. Instead, big data is about leveraging the unique and actionable insights gleaned about your customers, products, and operations to rewire your value creation processes, optimize your key business initiatives, and uncover new monetization opportunities. Big data is about making money, and that's ...