Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business

Chapter 12

Launching Your Big Data Journey

Data has always been the fuel that powers insightful business thinking. Leading organizations have historically leveraged data and analytics to identify and act on market opportunities faster than their competitors. But in the world of big data and advanced analytics, data has assumed a front-and-center role in transforming key business processes and creating new monetization opportunities. Big data, with access to rich sources of web, social media, mobile, sensor, and telemetry data, is yielding new insights about customers, products, operations, and markets. Leading organizations are using these insights to rewire their value creation processes, provide competitive differentiation, and drive a more relevant and profitable customer experience.

This book provides tips, techniques, and a “how to” guide—complete with worksheets, sample exercises, and real-world examples—to help organizations:

• Identify where and how to start their organization's big data journey.
• Uncover opportunities to leverage big data capabilities and technologies to optimize existing business processes and create new monetization opportunities.
• Drive collaboration between the business and IT stakeholders around a business-enabling big data strategy.

This chapter uses the Big Data Storymap (Figure 12.1), which has been provided courtesy of EMC, to summarize the key observations and strategies presented in this book.

Figure 12.1 Big Data Storymap

The goal of the Big ...