Beginners Guide:

The Big Data Holy Grail

We generate 2.8 trillion gigabytes of data a year, globally. By 2020, that number will balloon to 40 trillion gigabytes per year. Is your organization prepared?

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Executive Summary
Big data. Its a deceptively simple term that describes a massively complex problem: Our ability to generate data is light-years ahead of our ability to analyze it, let alone turn that analysis into actionable information. But, the companies that manage to solve this puzzle will reap enormous rewards in myriad areas operational efficiencies, more rigorous governance, industry insight, and market leadership, to name a few. This IT Brief Beginners Guide outlines the 3 Key Components needed to Successfully harness Big Data.

Key Takeaways:
Harness Big Data Manage Information Analyze High-Perfornce Deploy Big Data Analytics

Big Data Beginners Guide: The Big Data Holy Grail

The Big Data Hol y Grail

Companies facing big data challenges capture and store data from a wide variety of sources. Some of this data is structured, for example: Databases XML data Data warehouses Enterprise systems, such as ERP and CRM applications A more challenging problem is unstructured data, such as: Email Social media chatter Spreadsheets Text documents Audio, photo, and video files This unstructured data is also known as dark data, emphasizing its resistance to analysis using traditional tools. Business intelligence vendors offer tools to query and analyze structured data. Data mining and analysis vendors offer tools that promise to demystify unstructured data. Combining the two, at a speed that keeps up with todays pace of business, in a way that gives the business user actionable information? Thats the big data holy grail. However daunting the challenge, cuttingedge companies are tackling it head-on because the potential rewards are so great. According to a survey from the Economist Intelligence Unit, (Big Data: Lessons from the Leaders, March 2012) Nearly half of 752 executives from companies described as

significantly ahead of their peers in financial terms described their organization as having a well-defined data strategy more than four times the figure for respondents who said they are on par with their peers in financial terms.

Big Data is A Big Deal

%
2012 2011 2010 90% of the data in the world today was created in the past 2 years alone.

Worldwide IP traffic will quadruple by 2015

Source: EM

Harnessing Big Data

Here are a few examples of specific ways organizations can put big data to work: Combine analysis of SKUs and Social Media feedback to spot buying trends. Combine analysis of inventory levels and customer loyalty program data to craft high-redemption coupon offers that maximize profit and clear out inventory. Use email/call-center transcript analysis to improve customer satisfaction Examine social media chatter for sentiment analysis Analyze collections data to target delinquent accounts with the highest probability of payment

Big Data Beginners Guide: The Big Data Holy Grail

Look Before You Leap

Now that you have a clearer idea of what big data is and why its potential value outweighs its challenges, you might be wondering (and worrying about) how far along your competitors are with their big data strategies. If youre feeling behind the curve, you might be tempted to forge ahead with a big data strategy ASAP . But, this is a time for careful planning, not a time to throw best practices out the window in a rush for ROI. Instead, learn from the mistakes of early adopters. New practices around analytics with big data are almost devoid of data management best practices such as data profiling, transformation, quality, and enhancement, as well as improvements to metadata and master data, says the Economist Intelligence Unit. The unfortunate consequence is that most data sets delivered in real time today are of minimal quality, richness, and audit-ability, as compared to data found in the average data warehouse. Data sets delivered as the output of big data analytics are in an even sorrier state.
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First Key: Information Management

The focus of Information Management (IM) is the ability of your organization to capture, organize, store, and deliver the right information to the right people.

Your big data strategy should factor in three key components: information management, high-performance analytics, and flexible deployment. Keeping these factors in mind will guide you toward a big data initiative that results in timely access to valuable, actionable information.

Best Practice: Improve the quality of your data Capturing and storing data is a challenge most companies have mastered were drowning in it. The organization of data requires a rigorous focus on data quality. After all, why bother analyzing low-quality data? A long-time mantra in the database world garbage in, garbage out is no less relevant in todays world of big data.
Big Data Beginners Guide: The Big Data Holy Grail

Complete, accurate, and consistent data is key. Best Practice: Foster a data-driven culture Big data isnt an IT initiative, its a business initiative across departments, from top to bottom. So, its important to think of big data as an ongoing, company-wide competency, rather than a series of short-term, confined IT projects. Database administrators have traditionally been the only people who manage data. However, C-level executives, marketing teams, operations mangers, etc. All need to make decisions based on data that is accessible across departments.

Third Key: Flexible Deployment

rapidly process data. Hiring and training are key priorities.

Because big data implementations deal with cumbersome data sets, its important for analysis solutions to be flexible. You also dont want to tie data to a particular analytical need. Best Practice: Focus on late binding for data analysis Most data analysis uses an early binding approach, where data is fit into a specific schema and bound to business rules at the outset. This is possible for simple, well-defined, structured data. But, if youre searching free text, machinegenerated data, or diverse data sets, it isnt practical, or even sometimes possible, to understand and model the data at the early stages. And, in most cases, you dont want to because early binding can irrevocably alter the data, tailoring it for a specific set of analytics . If the organization needs to slice and dice the data for different uses, they must repeatedly rebuild the models. Best Practice: Explore cloud options Cloud computing can be a perfect fit for big data implementations, especially for companies struggling with storage budgets. Cloud computing also gives companies access to a valuable asset: third-party data. Combining internal data with outside data, such as financial

Second Key: High-Performance Anal ytics

Best Practice: Know what business goals your data will support Do not make the mistake of framing big data as a technology problem. First and foremost, its a business problem. Thus, your big data strategy does not start with technology; it starts with the business problems youre trying to solve. Dont go looking for answers when you dont know the questions. Best Practice: Invest in Staffing The Economist Intelligence Unit study reported 41 percent of survey respondents as saying that a lack of skilled staff hampers their attempts to

Big Data Beginners Guide: The Big Data Holy Grail

80% of the worlds data is unstructured, and therefore untapped.

market data, weather data, and aggregated industryspecific data, can give organizations a new level of insight and identity. Think of it as looking at the companys data in the context of its specific industry, or even a global economy a view that shows both the forest and the trees, so to speak.

Conclusion
Big data is not just a buzzword. A recent Gartner study indicates that 80 percent of the worlds data is unstructured, and therefore largely untapped. Thus, many companies are making missioncritical decisions based on only 20 percent of their data. Companies that can start to access their unstructured data, and layer in third-party data, and do it all at the speed of business will be able to say they really treat their hard-won data as an asset, not just something they store and wish they could use. Big data is fraught with complexity and that complexity is only going to grow. However, the potential rewards are so great, big data is a buzzword your company ignores at its own peril.

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