1.

What business benefits did the organizations described in this case

achieve by analyzing and using big data?

The business benefits realized by various companies using big data as

mentioned in the case study:
- Businesses such as YouTube, Amazon, and Spotify have built
their organizations with big data as a foundation that caters
recommendations and preferences to specific people depending
on their searches or activity within the website. => Extremely
beneficial as the consumers don’t have to look anywhere else for
other items or content because it is in their recommended already.
- This continues to draw the same users back to the platform,
increasing the organizations’ users, the longevity of the
organization, efficiency, and lowering the cost of research and
development.
- These organizations use big data to locate the lowest price of a
product, service and display it to the customer in order to secure
purchases and loyalty from them. Products such as cars,
computers, phones, clothing, airfare, hotels are just some
examples of goods and services that can be located using big
data.
- The organizations’ forecast is based on big data from customers.
These are popular demands from people, and a company offering
the lowest prices will be successful.
- Data sets on people’s shopping habits, incomes, hobbies,
residences, and (via mobile devices) movements from place to
place. => Forecasting demand.
- Spotify: Offer highly personalized, curated music streaming
services for enhancing their user experience based on their tastes,
likings, and behavior (both past and current).
- Skyscanner: Offer best deals available for airline bookings by
analyzing data from different travel agents, websites, airlines and
applying predictive algorithms
- Healthcare companies: Combine data from clinical trials, insurance
companies, and smart devices to find effective and cost-efficient
treatment methods => To predict the emergence and spread of
diseases; analyzing billions of data points collected on patients,
 healthcare providers, and the effectiveness of prescriptions and
treatments has helped the UK National Health Service (NHS) save
about 581 million pounds (the U.S. $784 million). => save budget
- Legal firms: Law enforcement
- Bank of New York Melon: To identify glitches in trading systems
- Boston’s Street Bump: To map the road conditions using phones’
accelerometer and provide real-time alerts to authorities for
attention and also long term planning /investment
- Big data is also providing benefits in sports (see the chapter-
opening case), education, science, health care, and law
enforcement.
2. Identify two decisions at the organizations described in this case that
were improved by using big data and two decisions that big data did not
improve.
For large businesses, big data is a valuable resource. Although it is
difficult to assess, when done correctly, it may be helpful to an
organization's performance and longevity. Big data assisted the UK
National Health Service (NHS) in prioritizing their "dashboard." NHS was
able to keep track of patients who used at least 10 different types of
drugs each day, as well as the sorts of medicines they were taking and
the most successful treatments for their ailments, by analyzing and
utilizing big data. In addition, the NHS used big data to find low-cost
ways to explore treatments for chronic illnesses and other ailments. By
combining big data and past knowledge, the NHS was able to save $581
million. Furthermore, New York City has had a long-standing problem
with high levels of crime. To address this problem, New York examined
big data to find "hot-spots" around the city where significant amounts of
criminal activity were occurring. New York City has increased police
presence in certain hotspots as a result of this approach, in order to
reduce crime and be closer to any potential occurrences in those
locations.

Big data, on the other hand, must be properly evaluated in order to be

effective. Meridian Energy Ltd, for example, has opted to employ big
data to more effectively distribute power. They developed algorithms to
forecast the need for maintenance on their major power components.
This program was ineffective because it never took into account real-
world failures. The primary issue was that this group held simulations.
They weren't real-life scenarios, and they didn't account for component
failures caused by real-life occurrences. Another example of big data
that did not improve an organization was with Google. Google had tried
to use its search engine to track the amount of people who had the
influenza disease. These results were skewed my social media outlets
and news coverage. Google did not realize that just because someone
searched up “Influenza” meant that they had it. This resulted in skewed
results, over counting the amount of people who actually had the
disease.

3. List and describe the limitations to using big data.

Big data comes with some big promises. However, this isn’t a tool with
limitless capabilities. Here are 5 limitations to the use of big data
analytics.
- Lack of clear objective and intent: Too many companies, seduced by
the promise of big data, jump into big data projects with nothing to show
for their efforts. They start amassing mountains of data with no clear
objective or understanding of exactly how analyzing big data will achieve
their goal or what questions they are trying to answer.
- Prioritizing correlations: Data analysts use big data to tease out
correlation when one variable is linked to another. However, big data
analysis doesn’t necessarily show causation or which correlations are
meaningful. More specifically, just because 2 variables are correlated or
linked doesn’t mean that a causative relationship exists between them.
For example, examining big data might show that from 2006 to 2011 the
United States murder rate was highly correlated with the market share of
Internet Explorer since both declined sharply. But that doesn’t
necessarily mean there is any meaningful connection between the two
phenomena.
- Lack of resources and capabilities to leverage big data: Facilitating the
processing of big data needs the deployment of assets to process the
data effectively and at a fast pace that demands capital investments
upfront. Also, highly skilled resources are required to understand the
data and to generate meaningful insights from the processed data. Apart
from this systems should be robust enough and controls should be in
place to prevent and abuse of data or breach of user’s privacy and
security.
- Inconsistency in data collection: All data sets and data-driven
forecasting models reflect the biases of the people selecting the data
and performing the analysis. Sometimes the tools we use to gather big
data sets are imprecise. For example, Google tried to calculate the
number of people with flu in the United States by relating people’s
location to flu-related search queries on Google. But they consistently
overestimated flu rates, when compared to conventional data collected
afterward by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The reason is
that Google’s algorithm only looked at numbers, not the context of the
search results.
- Challenging to information security and privacy: companies are now
aggressively collecting and mining massive data sets on people. Most of
them might not want to disclose such information, but they might not
even know such information about them exists. Privacy experts worry
that people will be tagged and suffer adverse consequences without due
process, the ability to fight back, or even knowledge that they have been
discriminated against.

4.Should all organizations try to collect and analyze big data? Why or
why not? What management, organization, and technology issues
should be addressed before a company decides to work with big data?
All organizations should try to collect and analyze big data.

Making sense of “big data” to improve decision making and business

performance has become one of the primary opportunities for
organizations of all shapes and sizes
A number of online services analyze big data to help consumers,
including services for finding the lowest price on autos, computers,
mobile phone plans, clothing, airfare, hotel rooms, and many other types
of goods and services
Big data is also providing benefits in sports (see the chapter-opening
case), education, science, health care, and law enforcement
Big data analysis in medicine helps doctors promptly detect dangerous
diseases of patients, create many drugs.
CompStat data can be displayed on maps showing crime and arrest
locations, crime hot spots, and other relevant information to help alerts
are easy to start getting them started.
Healthcare companies are currently analyzing big data to determine the
most effective and economical treatments for chronic illnesses and
common diseases and provide personalized care recommendations to
patients.
->So, because of the above reasons, organizations should use big data
Management, organization, and technology issues should be addressed
before a company decides to work with big data:
-Identify the intent/objective of using big data
-Have the buffer to invest in assets(big data analysis tools) that can
process big data efficiently
-Have sufficiently skilled human resources
-There are really quality, creative and responsible human resources
when there is an important job
-Acquire the capability to ensure data security and prevent and breach of
privacy