Big Data

6 T = TRANSFORM BUSINESS

Metrics, data and analytics are transforming the world including business. How much and how far you go in your business is up to you. But opportunities already exist to:

• Better understand and target customers.
• Improve and optimize business processes.
• Improve people's health and well-being.
• Increase security and reduce fraud.
• Drive business and people performance.
• Improve cities and other infrastructure.

Better understand and target customers

By expanding on traditional data sets to include Big Data, structured and unstructured data such as social media, browser logs and/or sensor data and applying text analytics and other tools, companies are now able to better understand their customers and their behaviours and preferences.

The big objective, in many cases, is to create predictive models. Most large retailers from grocery chains to telecom providers to investment banks employ some form of predictive analytics in an attempt to get a jump on their competition.

Remember US retailer Target's pregnancy predictor model that alerts them to the probability that someone buying a specific combination of 25 products is pregnant. Social science has shown that most people make their buying decisions based on habit rather than choice – especially for the products sold by Target. When someone visits a supermarket they are not assessing the different types of butter on sale and weighing up the options; they are usually buying what they always buy. Occasionally ...