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Chapter 9 Business Analytics Book Assignments

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Chapter 9 Questions for Discussion

1. Big data has been defined differently by different scholars from different academic

backgrounds. According to Sun et al. (2021), big data is data which exceeds the

capability of the traditional data analytic tools. Additionally, big data is in complex large

volumes of data sets that may be structured and unstructured and mostly is in petabytes,

zettabytes and even exabytes. Also, big data requires specialized bigdata software’s and

architecture solutions to handle. Further, Sun et al. (2021), highlighted that big data has

three main attributes which includes; it is in large amounts of datasets, it must be

processed and analyzed at a lightning speed and that it is collected from many different

data sources and forms. Big data is very important as it is used by many companies in all

business fields to provide beter customer services, to improve business operations, to

increase company returns, to provide personalized marketing and to give organizations a

competitive edge in the highly competitive business world. Big data comes from many

different sources such as mobile apps, social networks, customer data bases, medical

records, documents, clickstream logs in the internet, transaction systems among other

data sources.

2. The future of big data is great, big data will not lose its popularity, however to maintain

its popularity it will have to keep advancing to cope up with the advancement in

technology. The future will see organizations making use of big data to put together data

analysis from digital world to find solutions for world problems. Additionally, future

looks bright for those careers related to big data. Also, big data is expected to be

extensively used in detecting all forms of frauds such as cymber frauds and electronic

frauds. In banks big data is expected to improve customer experiences. In the government
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big data is anticipated to improve government services extensively such as healthcare and

public safety. Furthermore, data volumes are anticipated to increase beyond 175

zettabytes by 2025. Great data scientists are expected to increase greatly and data privacy

will remain a very hot issue even with development and advancement of big data.

3. Big data analytics is the process of collecting, processing, cleaning and analyzing large

data sets to discover, correlations and data patterns to help make some reliable inferences

which can help in decision making. Bigdata analytics and regular analytics are different

in that, the tools and techniques of analyzing big data analytics are more sophisticated as

they can handle parallel computing than the ones used for regular data analytics. The

nature of big data has three main attributes; Volume, Variety and Velocity. Also, the

traditional or regular data is usually structured and majorly measured in megabytes and

gigabytes, on the other hand big data is measured in petabytes, terabytes and even

exabytes.

4. The critical success factors for big data analytics are fundamental when implementing

bigdata analytics in projects so as to overcome the challenges attached to big data

analytics implementation. There are several critical success factors for big data analytics

to consider which include; data integrity and quality, the higher the quality and level of

data integrity the more successful the implementation is. Management commitment; the

higher the management commitment to data analytics the higher the level of success

experienced in implementation. The organization capacity in terms of resources is also

key to successful implementation of big data analytics. The human capability is also key,

as how successful the bigdata analytics is implemented depends on the skills of the
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person implementing it. The perceived benefit of the system also determines how

successful it is during the implementation.

5. The big challenges one should be mindful of when considering implementing big data

analytics may include. Shortage of big data analysis professionals. Additionally, the great

need for data synchronization in different data sources is a major challenge to consider.

Also, to get meaningful and accurate insights is a challenge. Since the information from

the data analytics may be accessible to only to a particular department big companies

may face the challenge of mending the wide gap in an effective way to benefit the whole

organization. Too, putting the large amount of data in the big data platform is not easy.

Further, uncertainty of the data land scape is another key challenge while implementing

bigdata analytics. Data storage is also a key challenge due to lack of enough data lakes.

Besides maintaining data security and privacy is also a key challenge in implementation

of big data analytics.

6. Big data analytics enables most business organizations to identify and harness new

business opportunities. The use of big data analytics has also enabled most businesses to

acquire new customers and retain their old customers as they can track customer behavior

and know when they might be at the risk of leaving to a competitor business. Further

bigdata analytics helps solve the problem of slow decision. Low productivity is also

reduced when businesses adopt bigdata analytics. Low sales can also be solved by use of

bigdata analytics to boost the sales. Financial efficiency which was a key problem has

been solved by use of big data analytics to ensure steady cash flow and capital in the

business.
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10. Streaming analytics is a principle of analyzing large in motion data streams referred to as

event streams. It differs with the regular analytics as traditional data analytics deals with

data stored in databases, files, and others where one has to query it to find the results, but

in streaming analytics data is not stored and the query is done on continuous flowing

data. Additionally streaming analytics is used for data sent in small sizes majorly

kilobytes as opposed to the regular data analytics which processes large volumes of data

at the same time. Also streaming analytics offers real time results that is provides as

opposed to the regular analytics which has no capability to offer real time results.

12. I believe stream analytics will have more use compared to regular analytics in the era of

big data analytics. This is because of its ability to offer real time results and the fact that

it can handle large amounts of motion data. Besides it is also time sensitive thus its

application may increase in the big data analytics era as data efficiency accuracy and

speed a key in big data analytics.

Application Case 9.7 Using social media for Nowcasting Flu Activity

1. Social media can serve as an early predictor of flu outbreaks because it can

supplement the existing surveillance systems to track flu related traffic on social

media as results indicated that its closely related to the actual flu outbreak.

2. Medical records may be used to help in predicting such outbreaks, as digital

surveillance systems have shown promise in their capacity to discover public health-

seeking patterns and transform these discoveries into actionable strategies to be used

by health officials and governments to develop more accurate and timely forecasting

models during outbreaks and to inform individuals about the locations that they

should avoid during that time period.

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3. The problem of disease outbreaks would be a good problem to solve using big data

technologies as the new data analytics techniques and technologies are capable of

detecting, tracking, mapping, and managing such diseases. For instance, the digital

surveillance systems have shown promise in their capacity to discover public health-

seeking patterns and transforming the discoveries into actionable strategies that can

help predict disease outbreaks (Corsi et al.,2021).

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References

Naeem, M., Jamal, T., Diaz-Martinez, J., Butt, S. A., Montesano, N., Tariq, M. I., ... & De-La-

Hoz-Valdiris, E. (2022). Trends and future perspective challenges in big data.

In Advances in intelligent data analysis and applications (pp. 309-325). Springer,

Singapore.

Sun, Z., & Huo, Y. (2021). The spectrum of big data analytics. Journal of Computer Information

Systems, 61(2), 154-162.