Big Data and Digital Transformation: Know How One Fuels the Other

Do you know drowning deep in data is not the same as big data? Let us understand the real definition of big data and an example of how big data can be used to fuel digital transformation.
You have probably heard the popular phrase "data is the new oil.” Actually, it’s a good metaphor, since oil doesn’t have any value on its own, it needs to be well refined to turn into something valuable like gasoline. The same is the case with data. We are all flooded with tons of data, but that large and disparate data doesn’t have any value until it gets refined into meaningful business insights that can be acted upon for our benefit. Thus in this post, we are going to understand how big data drives digital transformation.

As a phrase, big data gets overused and misunderstood by many of us. It's not just about having a large amount of data. However, it’s all about combining both unstructured and structured data to derive meaningful business insights that were never possible before.
Structured data is all the data that fits into conventional databases and spreadsheets - your customer list, your profit and loss account, information about your products, services and business processes, etc. Unstructured data is usually too large to fit into traditional databases – public APIs from governments, Google Trends data, raw Twitter firehose, and feeds from Internet of Things sensors. When you layer unstructured data sets atop structured data sets, magic happens! 

Let us dive into one quick example
A hundred year old company went to its data analyst team and asked it to leverage big data to identify an intelligent way to predict sales. For the last few decades, the company had been making predictions by looking at the sales figures of how many products they had sold the previous month and how many products they had sold a year ago in the month.
 
This time the data analyst team started their analysis by looking at Google Trends to see which products and brands people were searching for the most.  They also analyzed their social networking channels to figure out what people were saying about their products and brands. Then, the data analyst team correlated that data with its actual sales figures to determine if it was predictive, and found that it absolutely was. This time, when it predicted sales by taking structured data sets and layering it onto unstructured data sets, the results were unbelievably accurate.

The bottom line is that companies should leverage big data when planning marketing campaigns, sales, and promotions. To leverage big data, it would be useful to take a course such as big data program for corporates from a well-reputed institute.


Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

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