Wednesday, 14 September 2022 4:33 pm

What is Big Data Analytics?

Big data analytics examines large amounts of data to uncover hidden patterns, correlations and other insights. With today’s technology, it’s possible to
analyze your data and get answers from it almost immediately – an effort that’s slower and less efficient with more traditional business intelligence
solutions.

History and evolution of Big Data Analytics

— The concept of big data has been around for years; most organizations now understand that if they capture all the data that s treams into their
businesses (potentially in real time), they can apply analytics and get significant value from it. This is particularly true when using sophisticated
techniques like artificial intelligence. But even in the 1950s, decades before anyone uttered the term “big data,” businesses were using basic analytics
(essentially, numbers in a spreadsheet that were manually examined) to uncover insights and trends.

— Some of the best benefits of big data analytics are speed and efficiency. Just a few years ago, businesses gathered informati on, ran analytics and
unearthed information that could be used for future decisions. Today, businesses can collect data in real time and analyze bi g data to make
immediate, better-informed decisions. The ability to work faster – and stay agile – gives organizations a competitive edge they didn’t have before

Why is big data analytics important?

— Big data analytics helps organizations harness their data and use it to identify new opportunities. That, in turn, leads to s marter business moves,
more efficient operations, higher profits and happier customers. Businesses that use big data with advanced analytics gain va lue in many ways, such
as:

 Reducing cost. Big data technologies like cloud-based analytics can significantly reduce costs when it comes to storing large amounts of data (for
example, a data lake). Plus, big data analytics helps organizations find more efficient ways of doing business.

 Making faster, better decisions. The speed of in-memory analytics – combined with the ability to analyze new sources of data, such as streaming
data from IoT – helps businesses analyze information immediately and make fast, informed decisions.

 Developing and marketing new products and services. Being able to gauge customer needs and customer satisfaction through analytics empowers
businesses to give customers what they want, when they want it. With big data analytics, more companies have an opportunity t o develop innovative
new products to meet customers’ changing needs.

Big data analytics in today’s world

— Most organizations have big data. And many understand the need to harness that data and extract value from it. But how? These resources cover the
latest thinking on the intersection of big data and analytics.

What are the 5 V's of Big Data?

— Big data is a collection of data from many different sources and is often describe by five characteristics: volume, value, va riety, velocity, and
veracity.

• Volume: the size and amounts of big data that companies manage and analyze

• Value: the most important “V” from the perspective of the business, the value of big data usually comes from insight discovery and pattern recognition
that lead to more effective operations, stronger customer relationships and other clear and quantifiable business benefits

• Variety: the diversity and range of different data types, including unstructured data, semi-structured data and raw data

• Velocity: the speed at which companies receive, store and manage data – e.g., the specific number of social media posts or search queries received
within a day, hour or other unit of time

• Veracity: the “truth” or accuracy of data and information assets, which often determines executive-level confidence

— The additional characteristic of variability can also be considered:

• Variability: the changing nature of the data companies seek to capture, manage and analyze – e.g., in sentiment or text analytics, changes in the
meaning of key words or phrases.

Understanding the Four Pillars of Big Data Analytics

• “Big Data is a term encompassing the use of techniques to capture, process, analyze and visualize potentially large datasets in a reasonable timeframe not
accessible to standard IT technologies.” By extension, the platform, tools and software used for this purpose are collectively called “Big Data
technologies” - NESSI (2012)

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• As consumers globally made adjustments to the new normal with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, their expectations underwent a drastic
change. Industry insiders believe that the customer expectations have touched an all-time high, pushing businesses to outperform competitors, enhance
efficiency and garner higher revenue.

• As a result, business analytics emerged to become one of the most popularly used services. The use of business analytics gained mainstream value
and continues to witness robust demand due to its ability to provide insights, predict an organization’s future and draw inferences from raw data leading
to a thinner margin for decision error.

Which are the top pillars of business analytics?

Below are the top four pillars of business analytics that deliver performance gains and bring competitive advantage to an organization.

1. Data

• Everyone will agree all business users look for more and more data. And that too not just within the company (such as traditional sources) but also from
outside sources (like social media data and real-time geo-location data). The presence of the data pillar helps balance governance and access, connect
disparate data sources irrespective of their location and type, acts as a base component for business strategy building and creates a virtual data
warehouse that is secure and easy to use.

2. People

• The presence of the people pillar helps unify the IT and business communities to achieve the company goals. The needs of IT focus on a program-
driven, visually rich and assembly-style development environment, and the business community users demand personalized self-service that enables
them to embed analytics practically in any app and display anywhere.

Which are the top pillars of business analytics?

3. Process

• This mainly focuses on the entire company and builds a fact or data-driven culture. Reason? Having the right data at the right time results in quicker
and accurate decisions. Here, the users rely on facts to make business decisions. Since different roles are responsible for different decision types, it’s
essential to use the same data to support varied processes.

• For example, while customer decisions depend on testimonials, business proposals and reports, dashboards are used by operational and executive
users for making decisions. All the different mentioned outputs should be created with reusable components and shared with varied groups to maximize
use.

4. Technology

• This pillar includes development and deployment with systems that disintegrate silos of capability. The tools or platforms used should support
integration, be open and extensible so that an easy-to-adapt flexible architecture can be built. The technology pillar drives cloud adoption because it can
be replaced without disintegrating the stack in its entirety.

Make Informed Decision and Align Outcomes to Business Strategy

• To sum up, business analytics implementation will fail to deliver the intended results unless approached with the right partner and an end-to-end business
transformation mindset. The ability to connect the dots within business analytics is simple when you collaborate with a world-class business analytics
solution provider that allows you to visualize, analyze and share actionable insights over billions of data records. Enterprises that can recognize
analytics as a strategic source of competitive advantage and implement It can unlock new market opportunities and implement business strategy as
soon as they arise.

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