Global Business Analytics Models: Concepts and Applications in Predictive, Healthcare, Supply Chain, and Finance Analytics

2. Collecting, Sorting, Prioritizing, and Storing Big Data

2.1 Finding and Capturing the Right Data

With the widespread use of multimedia and social networks in today’s digital world, we were ushered into the era of big data measured in terabytes, petabytes, and zettabytes. For example, Brown, Chui, and Manyika (2011) reported that in 15 of the U.S. economy’s 17 sectors, companies with more than 1,000 employees amassed, on average, over 235 terabytes (235,000 gigabytes or 235 million megabytes) of data—more data than was contained in the U.S. Library of Congress. If properly managed, big data can become a valuable corporate asset since it helps the deeper understanding of business activities including customer behaviors and thus facilitates ...