The 21st Century Gold Rush: the value of big data

Big data is an important resource, but tapping into this requires good strategy.

Businesses today have access to unprecedented amounts of commercial and personal data from their customers, partners, connected services and digital advertising tactics. Data-backed decision making can eliminate any guesswork from strategy. (Kristian Hammond, Harvard Business Review 2013) But marketers must use caution when turning to their reserves of data - proper understanding of big data is the only way to gain true insight.

"Evidence" and "data" are not one in the same, advises Kristian Hammond in his 2013 article in the Harvard Business Review. Hammond describes data as the raw material from which businesses can extract meaning through critical evaluation. The value from big data comes not from the information itself, but from the organisation's ability to interpret it correctly.

Shelly Blake-Plock, in his article for Forbes' Tech Council, agrees. (Shelly Blake-Plock, Forbes Tech Council Post 2017) He discusses the issue of volume in relation to our own, human, ability to find patterns in information, concluding that we lack the capacity to gain meaningful understanding of such "granular" information on our own. (Blake-Plock, 2017) While big data can be immensely useful, the actual individual pieces of information themselves are so tiny, we lack the ability to discern patterns without the assistance of a well-developed analytics infrastructure.

So, the big question with big data is how to make it work for you. The big answer? 

Data analytics.

Finding useful information in the ever-growing collection of online data without a well-defined analytics process is like hoping to stumble across one needle in every fifty haystacks you encounter. Both Hammond and Blake-Plock work in the field of big data analytics, and both outline the strategies their organisations use to make sense of all this information.

Hammond's company, Narrative Science, offers a platform called Quill, which uses AI to build a plain-language narrative from billions of retail sales datapoints. (Narrative Science, 2020) This near real-time stream of chronologically ordered information allows executives to review performance and amend strategy much faster than before. 

Blake-Plock's company, Yet Analytics, offers data analytics for HR operations through a platform using AI. This platform attributes information to individual employees, offering a personalised HR experience which details all staff data from entry to exit. (Yet Analytics, 2020) Both of these platforms use AI and have specific methods of approach, recognising the value of different types of data for different sectors.

Planning an effective analytics strategy is different to every organisation and sector. A major bank would collect and analyse different data types than an online fashion retailer. To utilise data most efficiently, businesses must determine the relevance of data types in relation to their goals. 

If you don’t have a good data analytics strategy and don’t regularly measure your performance against solid KPIs, you’re gonna have a bad time.

(Source: Tenor/South Park)

Resources:

Analytics, Y., n.d. Yet Analytics [WWW Document]. URL https://www.yetanalytics.com (accessed 2.18.20).

Council, E., Forbes Technology, n.d. Where’s The Value In Big Data? [WWW Document]. Forbes. URL https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/04/14/wheres-the-value-in-big-data/ (accessed 2.18.20).

Hammond, K.J., 2013. The Value of Big Data Isn’t the Data. Harvard Business Review.

Products, 2018. . Narrative Science. URL https://narrativescience.com/products/ (accessed 2.18.20).

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