Decision Support, Analytics, and Business Intelligence, Third Edition

CHAPTER 4

Using Big Data for Decision Support

Over the past 60 years, managers in organizations large and small have struggled to capture, manage, and use data. During the 1970s and 1980s, much of the focus was on managing data to create information. The 1990s brought the notions of data warehousing (DW) and knowledge management and creating a knowledge organization and subsequently creating the knowledge society. Since the turn of the current decade, the 2010s, managers, technologists, and business strategists find themselves struggling with data concerns once more. Now managers must focus on big data—large volumes of varied data collected by organizations that require extensive storage, management, and analytic processing capabilities.

Big ...