4 Questions Faced When Adopting Business Analysis with Big Data
To remain competitive, many companies are transforming their business models with an important focus on the daily growing amount of data. The ability to continuously evaluate large and unstructured data streams and to draw relevant conclusions for their business activities has become an essential competitive advantage for many companies.
Innovation or Just Cost Saving?
Companies more and more recognize that performing right data analysis and interpretation can lead to better decisions. Companies in the Asia Pacific and the Americas are to an even higher degree of awareness of the data analysis advantages compared to those in Europe.
Companies in Europe are more cautious in implementation, although they have also recognized the importance of data analysis. European-based companies use data to process cost optimization and reductions. While American-based companies are using data analysis for innovation to improve their products and services.
What are the Advantages?
Companies in various industries have already started to adapt data-driven business – particularly companies that are confronted daily with large amounts of market-relevant data. These include financial services, telecom and pharmaceutical companies, but also companies from the consumer goods industry and the retail trade.
For banks and insurance companies, to evaluate financial value and identify operational risks in the complex business models is a core issue, which make Big Data and sophisticated data analysis become increasingly important.
What to Invest in?
One difficulty with data collection is to recognize what business question be clarified. The biggest hurdle already represents the initial definition of the data that need to be collected.
Moreover, companies need to understand what technical skills and software tools are required to support their business data analysis. With traditional data technologies, to evaluate and analyze huge amounts of data are not feasible in many cases because the traditional data solution often associated with long analysis times, especially in dealing with unconstructed data. Therefore, it is becoming apparent that companies will prepare for a large resource investment for Big Data analysis.
Is There a Perfect Line between Data Analysis and Privacy?
In the data world, there are always debates on the benefits and risks for the collection and the use of data, and the line between data analysis and privacy is usually very difficult to define.
In the age of Big Data, balancing between business needs and personal information becomes even more challenging. Better technology and more granular data enable companies to better understand and serve their customers. But they also raise ownership, security and privacy issues.
