The epoch of Big Data is here. The rate at which the quantity of enterprise data is being accumulated is rising exponentially. Proliferation of social media, web analytics, artificial intelligence, as well as other types of budding technologies is generating new data streams, which only add to conventional data stores like financial data and transaction records.
Big Data provides a frontier of openings that enable businesses across different industries to enhance everything from customer service and marketing to product development and manufacturing. Despite all these opportunities, a unique group of business challenges still exists. Problems such as storing and/or accessing large data sets are obvious. The bigger challenge lies in assembling and/or interpreting disparate data types. Amassing vast amounts of information is not the main value of Big Data. The chief value of Big Data lies in extracting nothing short of actionable insights via deep analysis and evaluation of data.
Understanding data-generation process
Most people out there believe that because data science is the foundation of data analytics, it somewhat represents the disembodied truth. Regrettably, this is wrong. The million dollar question remains, how can business leaders learn to differentiate between bad and good analytics? It all begins with the simple understanding of the entire data-generation process. It is simply wrong to judge the quality of data analytics if you lack a clear idea of the source of data. To arrive at informed decisions, it really helps to take one-step back and institute some fundamentals.
Use domain knowledge
On top of ensuring that data is generated bearing analytics in mind, managers ought to use their business knowledge to account for any strange results. Analytics is not only about crunching numbers within a vacuum. Data scientists normally do not have the domain expertise that managers have. Additionally, analytics cannot become a substitute for understanding a business.
Do Not Just Think About It - Know It
Decision making in the world of business is being transformed in a similar way that healthcare is, characterized with the prevalent adoption of "evidence-based medicine." As analytics and big data bring about the revolution, managers that know and understand everything about data science will surely have an edge. Above and beyond being the main gatekeepers of their analytics, leaders ought to make sure that the knowledge they have is effortlessly shared across their organization. For instance, a data-literate and disciplined company is most likely to learn much faster as well as add more value across the board.
The truth is, while most companies continue to gather all manner, forms and volumes of data, petabytes, terabytes, unstructured and structured, in matters of getting insights, and where insights really matter, most organizations are losing their way big time. So what does this mean? It simply means that the ability to act right on an insight is being missed. With data analytics, you should be able to avoid this and conquer the entire field of Big Data.