BIG DATA USE CASES

INTEGRATING BIG DATA INTO YOUR

BUSINESS MODEL.

The power of big data lies in creating a complete view of critical But what value? What data? How much? How frequently? What
business issues. The depth of insight depends on bringing analytics? These are questions that must be answered in detail
together structured and unstructured data in a timely fashion to provide the right context for making technology investments.
from sources internal and external to the enterprise. Advanced
analytics can then tap this data pool to unlock the key insights
that drive significant business value.

Generally, we find that five categories of use cases are primarily driving the adoption of big data.

TYPES OF USE CASES DRIVING BIG DATA ADOPTION

Data Exploration • Federated view of enterprise-wide data

1 • Discovery portal in order to become more data-driven
• Platform for proof of concept (POC)

Customer • Historical view of customer via master device management (MDM), data warehouse, or a
360-Degree View customer relationship management (CRM) application
2 • 360-degree view connecting this structured data with “what is happening now” (social
media, event-driven data, mobility, etc.)
• Customer engagement: the right offer at the right time

Operational • Reduced costs and increased efficiency with machine-generated data

3
Systems Analysis • Areas of opportunity include monitoring and analyzing systems in real time (e.g., traffic
management, proactive maintenance) or pooling operational data for pattern/anomaly
analysis

Storage/Data • Technology that increases the value of existing data warehouses, such as streaming
4 Warehouse
Augmentation
capabilities, unstructured data management, cost-effective storage, ETL offload, and
contextual/cognitive solutions

Security Intelligence • Event log and packet data-level analysis

5 Extension • Discovering threats sooner and taking action (preventative and/or retrospective) in real
time or near real time
BIG DATA USE CASE BRIEF

A detailed business use case includes objectives and scope, performance requirements, data
acquisition and organization, analytics requirements and workflow requirements

BUSINESS BUSINESS DATA

ANALYTICS WORKFLOW
OBJECTIVES PERFORMANCE ACQUISITION AND
REQUIREMENTS REQUIREMENTS
AND SCOPE (SLAS) ORGANIZATION

• Business • Response time • Frequency of ingest • Retrieval/summary • Output to humans

imperative statistics or analytic or machines
• Real time, near real • Scheduled or
models
• Current process time, or batch continuous input • How the output
and limitations • Simple or advanced integrates with
• Data availability • Number of data
models existing workflow
• Impact on and retention sources
revenues • SAS/SPSS vs. • Format of output
• Number of users • Structured or
and costs R/custom
unstructured data
• Experience level
• Transformative • Descriptive or
of users • Type of data
opportunity prescriptive statistics
(key value,
• Security and privacy
• Challenges and geographical, text, • Need for interactive
constraints • Application availability object, etc.) business intelligence
(technical, and visualization
• Disaster recovery • Volume of data
organizational,
• Production or
regulatory) • Need for updates/
exploratory analysis
rewrites/deletes
• Scope
(geography,
line of business)

Factors for consideration in defining big data use cases.

SAMPLE INDUSTRY USE CASES

Auto Insurance Consumer Finance

Insurance providers are revolutionizing auto insurance
pricing through telematics: the practice of putting sensors
in cars to measure driving behavior. The business objective
is to underprice competitors in an industry where $5 billion
in advertising chases a fixed premium base. The data can
include traditional underwriting variables (age, automobile
credit scores, prior claims) and new data (speed, routes,
braking, etc.). Analytics may include regression to compute
the likelihood of an accident and clustering (i.e., this driver
resembles that driver). Big data infrastructure can be
designed to:
• Increase data insight: For example, new data gathered
by in-vehicle sensors or telematics on mileage and speed
can be used to calculate data on acceleration and braking
trends.
• Improve data storage: New data can be stored (e. g.,
Hadoop), processed (e.g., Java, MapReduce) and
merged with historical and archived data (e g., in a
data warehouse).
• Develop new business models: Analytic results can lead
to new models for calculating and managing risk and
identifying individual and demographics trends and put
them into production (e.g., with SAS or R).
In consumer finance, data analytics is a relatively mature
practice with financial institutions relying on analytics to assess
risk, inform investments, tailor marketing and identify fraud. By
bringing technologies like Hadoop and in-memory databases
into the data ecosystem, financial institutions can get more from
their analytics practices. For example:
• Hadoop for data warehouse optimization: Underwriting
models are constantly evolving, and financial institutions are
always looking to gain an edge in understanding customer
risk. Giving analytics teams the ability to experiment with
all of the historical data in its native form allows them to
quickly build, compare and choose their ‟golden″ models
on a regular basis. Institutions can stay current with market
trends and avoid being blindsided by frequent charge-offs
from risky customers.

2 © Copyright 2014 by World Wide Technology, Inc. All Rights Reserved


• In-memory databases for real-time analytics: When
customers call to close an account, rapid information
gathering and analysis with an in-memory system can
provide a recommended list of deals customer service
representatives can offer to retain business. Text
transcriptions of past phone calls, historical clickstream
information and all other customer touch points can
be used to develop the deal that offers the highest
probability of retention.
• Parallelized algorithms for fast, full-population model
building: As parallelized algorithms foster faster
analysis on much larger sets of data, financial services
organizations can quickly develop, test and deploy
detailed models that deliver a 360-degree view of
evolving customer behavior to lower risk and increase
profit. For example, institutions can build accurate
models in hours, rather than days or weeks, that forecast
spending and determine who should receive a loan or
credit card, how much credit should be extended to
an individual, whether to proactively extend credit to
profitable customers, and identify propensity to attrite.
Healthcare
By unifying dispersed data sets and applying advanced
analytics, healthcare organizations have the opportunity to
improve medical outcomes, lower costs and inform strategic
planning. Healthcare use cases include:
• Improving at-risk prioritization: Healthcare organizations
can use analytics to predict which patients are at risk
of noncompliance with clinical guidelines for treatable
conditions like diabetes or osteoporosis, which improves
medical outcomes, reduces hospitalization and boosts
HEDIS scores.
• Simplifying claims and operations: By using pattern
matching to find possible excess charges and prioritizing
bills for review before payments, healthcare payers can
avoid overpayment and detect questionable charges,
avoiding pay and chase.
• Maintaining optimal staffing: Using big data analytic
models to forecast patient visits and accurately predict
changes in census, hospitals can avoid overstaffing,
improve staffing flexibility with real-time updates and
lower overall staffing costs without sacrificing patient care.
• Strengthening marking and expansion planning:
Healthcare organizations can use clinical, financial
and demographic data to micro-segment the market
for preventative and elective procedures—or even
systematically choose sites for planned expansion—with
enriched datasets and nonlinear, multivariate predictive
analytic models.
© Copyright 2014 by World Wide Technology, Inc. All Rights Reserved
BIG DATA USE CASE BRIEF
Transportation
Transportation agencies are continuously pulling data—whether
from ticket transactions, mobile tracking and scheduling
applications or RFID and customer relationship management
(CRM) systems. When these agencies build a unified data
platform and apply advanced analytics, they begin seeing
business value across their organizations, including:
• Infrastructure: By using zip codes and rider-specific data to
better understand customer numbers and travel patterns,
organizations can add stops to accommodate riders, improve
route planning, better manage capacity, increase revenue
and maximize the availability of assets and infrastructure.
• Customer service: To improve customer service, agencies
can use identity resolution analytics to map data to
individual customers and create in-depth profiles that can
be integrated directly into their CRM systems, providing real-
time access to all historical customer data and streamlining
operations and workflows for customer service reps.
• Operations: Overlaying multiple data sets, such as
customer locations and issues, using location analytics with
visualization can identify customer clustering and service
trends, quickly spot problem areas and resolve service
delivery issues faster.
• Marketing and Sales: Customer profile data sets allow
agencies to segment customers and accounts across the
network to provide marketing teams and advertisers better
visibility into customer bases in stations, on board vehicles
and along rail routes.
Utilities
Utility companies are generating terabytes of data from meters
and other end-point sensors daily. This ready store of data
has the advantage of size, scope (presenting a long-term view
incorporating historical records) and potential predictive insight
(indicating trends and patterns). Sensor data can be further
combined with associated data, such as maintenance notes, call
center and customer service records and external data sources
to provide utilities a better view into consumption patterns and
grid risks.
• Operational inefficiency identification: The combination
of data sources and application of exploratory analyses
helps to uncover which transformers are contributing to
inefficiencies. Data compiled from multiple sources (such as
scheduling, status, sensor readings, meter and external data)
provide visibility into operations.
• Alarm stratification: Analytical profiling of and clustering
of alarms can be used as a basis for re-stratifying alarms,
showing how potential features such as volume and
response rate can be used to define groupings. A successful
stratification might reduce the number of critical alarms
and increases the potential classifications. Alarm operators
report that analytics decreases time wasted dealing
with supposedly ‟critical” alarms and improves overall
troubleshooting, leading to greater efficiency in the alarm
monitoring process.
3
BIG DATA USE CASE BRIEF

Conclusion BIG DATA WORKSHOP

As data sources inside and outside the
organization overwhelm legacy data
warehouses and application infrastructures,
enterprises face a new class of challenges
and a new imperative for change. Identifying
your core use cases is an important step in
establishing a big data roadmap and moving
forward efficiently and cost-effectively.
To be successful, big
data decisions need to
be grounded in business
value.
The WWT Big Data Workshop is a two- to four-hour technical and strategic
whiteboard session designed to increase your understanding of big data and
help you outline your strategy for using a big data analytics solution to add
value. Attendees will work with WWT experts to develop specific use cases
and better understand available solutions, their architectural differences and
the specific benefits each provides.
This workshop gives your organization the opportunity to gain a better
understanding of big data as it relates to your mission critical goals and to
discuss proven and potential use case scenarios. Attendees will gain valuable
insight into a big data analytics solution available today, including its key
benefits and architectural differences, in order to evaluate which solutions
will work best for their organization.
Contact us at:
BigData@wwt.com to schedule a Big Data Workshop for your organization.

WWT can help bring the competitive advantages and benefits of

big data to your organization in a way that supports your business goals.
We are here to talk about next steps and answer any questions.

Learn More
Contact us at: BigData@wwt.com
Learn more at: www.wwt.com
Download our comprehensive big data guide:
Turning Big Data into Business Value: A Practical Guide to Big Data.

© 2014, World Wide Technology. All rights reserved. World Wide Technology, Inc.
60 Weldon Parkway
St. Louis, MO 63043
800.432.7008
www.wwt.com