Streaming Data

Streaming Data: Concepts That Drive Innovative Analytics

Managers and staff who are responsible for planning, hiring, and resource allocation throughout an organization need to consider the fast-growing impact of data and analytics. If this topic doesn’t fill you with excitement, you can at least take on its study out of a well-justified concern that your industry is undergoing profound change. Organizations everywhere are disrupting business, government, and society through the use of these analytics. You need to understand the field to help your organization survive—and hopefully to grow and contribute to the common good.

This report deals in particular with streaming data, a set of tools and practices for quick decision making in response to fast-changing events. Here are a few examples of how such analytics are changing businesses:

• Online services for movies and other content, such as Netflix and Amazon.com, analyze customer behavior to make better predictions, as made famous by the Netflix Prize.

• Walmart, a long-term champion of efficiency, is using these technologies to improve the customer experience in multiple ways.

• Banks are detecting fraud in the use of credit cards and mobile payments.

• John Deere classifies plants in the fields in order to reduce pesticide use, while robots record their collection of fruit to predict yields.

It is difficult to quantify the growth of streaming analytics, for many reasons. Observers don’t track it as a distinct discipline, ...