Big Data

2 S = START WITH STRATEGY

Smarter business starts with strategy. And that's true whether you're a Big Data giant like Amazon or Google or a small family run corner shop.

It is easy to get lost and overwhelmed by the science of data and analytics. Considering that was true before Big Data it is exponentially so today. Business leaders all over the world are bamboozled. They read how Big Data giants never throw away any data, how everything in these data rich companies is captured and analysed because it's valuable and potentially offers unique and powerful insights for business development. Not even errors are discarded…Take misspelt names and search queries – surely that's data that can be deleted. Not to Google it's not. Instead of ignoring it they used it to compile the world's best spell checker!¹

For most business leaders the very idea of collecting and storing everything is genuinely terrifying. Not least because they already have a mountain of archive material that is lying in dusty folders in the basement never mind having to deal with all the new stuff that is generated every day! Even a moment's contemplation of the issues a business potentially faces in the Big Data world is exhausting and stressful… What constitutes everything, what sort of format, where will it be stored, how will it be stored, who will use it, who will own it, how will we pay for it, what will we do with it, where do we even start?

The thing is, for Big Data giants like Tesco, Walmart or Amazon ...