Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business

Chapter 9

Identifying Big Data Use Cases

Big data is about business transformation. I've made this point pretty clear thus far throughout the book. As discussed several times, big data can help the business stakeholders optimize their existing business processes and uncover new monetization opportunities. Big data is unlike most IT initiatives in that it requires a close and on-going collaboration with the business stakeholders to ensure that whatever is being developed and delivered is relevant and material to the business. Unlike traditional enterprise resource management (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) types of IT projects which can be executed with limited business stakeholder engagement, a big data project, especially one that is targeting business transformation, requires more than just business stakeholder involvement—a big data project requires deep and on-going business stakeholder leadership.

How do business and IT stakeholders collaborate to identify the right business opportunity upon which to focus the big data initiative, and then design the right architecture to exploit these big data monetization opportunities? How do you ensure the successful deployment of these new big data capabilities given the historically high rate of failure for the adoption of new technologies?

This chapter will introduce a tried and proven methodology—the vision workshop—that is based on the simple premise that business opportunities must drive big data adoption. While ...