Big Data refers to the tools, processes and procedures that allow an organisation to create, manipulate and manage very large data sets and storage facilities. But it is the ability to analyse and leverage this data that will be key to generating value for businesses, fuelling growth and ensuring a competitive advantage.
With the cost of disk space being so inexpensive, and server farms being easily accessible through the cloud, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the hoarding of large volumes of data is commonplace within many organisations. The old adage that “data is useless and information is priceless” is more pertinent now than ever before.
Making sure you have the right information getting to the right people at the right time is crucial to the ‘intelligent’ operation of any business. For businesses to stay ahead of the market and the competition, they need to invest in techniques to make the best use of their data in order to facilitate the right strategic decisions.
Big Data is characterised by volume, velocity and variety.
Organisations should not be afraid of huge volumes of data if it is planned, managed and structured in a way that is readily accessible to those that need it. Data warehousing has now matured to a level where it can quite quickly demonstrate real business benefit by delivering the right information to key decision makers. This information could be on anything from staff to products but, if harnessed in the correct way, has the potential to boost business performance.
Data warehouses are structured in a way that allows the data mart to be interrogated across slices of time. Historically, when disk space wasn’t as readily available, these refreshes could be carried out over days, weeks or months. Now, with space as it is, it is not unrealistic to get near real time or transaction based snapshots of current data. This is termed as the velocity of ‘Big Data’.
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Organisations should not be afraid of huge
volumes of data if it is managed in a way that is readily accessible to those that need it
Obviously with a greater volume and velocity of data there will be a higher definition picture of how the business is performing, which will in turn allow for clearer decisions to be made.
The final component of Big Data characterisation is the variety of data, some of which may not be held in any relational structures. An example of this could be tweets from social networking, music files or images, none of which would fit neatly into any star schema within a data warehouse. Data mining tools, however, flourish with such large unstructured data sets. They interrogate the data looking for pattern matches that then produce useful information, which can then be used by the business to aid decision making.
Database providers such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, as well as those less well known such as MarkLogic and Neo4J, along with cloud platforms
Amazon and Google,
are all staking their claim in the Big Data market by providing different
mechanisms for storing and holding the diverse varieties of data, and allowing methods to interrogate and make sense of the data you have.
It is easy to get carried away with new ideas and buzz words and it is crucial that companies maintain their competitive edge, but you have got to get the basics right first. There is no use hoarding vast volumes of a variety of different data, and at a frequent velocity if you cannot understand what you are looking at.
Emphasis should be given to thorough business analysis to capture the reporting requirements correctly, which in turn drives the data warehouse design to ensure an accurate, performant solution. Transforming or reconciling a variety of data sources will probably unravel a multitude of data quality issues that require data ownership, as well as time and effort to carry out data cleansing exercises.
Businesses will need to invest in reporting, analytics or dashboarding tools to enable them to extract and interpret information from the vast quantities of their data. But when they do, those businesses will then be able to make decisions with the right information at the right time, facilitating growth and ensuring a competitive advantage.
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