August 2, 2012

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As our world continues to become completely immersed in digital technology, the amount of data available has exploded. As a business executive analyzing large data sets – big data – will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms.

Leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data, not just a few data-oriented managers within your organization. This is due to the increasing volume and amount of detailed information being captured by the rise of multimedia, enterprises, mobile , social media and  more — that the Internet makes available to us.

In fact, in most industries, everyone from established competitors to new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value from deep and up to real-time information. Big data also offers considerable benefits to consumers just as much as it does to companies and organizations. For example, there are many different services that are enabled by personal-location based data.

How to Use Big Data to Create Value

There are five broad ways in which using big data can create value for your company and your consumers.

1. As organizations create and store more transactional data in digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything from product inventories to sick days, and therefore expose variability and boost performance.

Leading companies are already using data collection and analysis to conduct controlled experiments to make better management decisions; others are using data for basic low-frequency forecasting to high-frequency ‘nowcasting’ to adjust their business levers just in time.

2. Big data can unlock significant value by making information transparent and usable at a much higher frequency.

3. Big data allows even narrower segmentation of customers and therefore much more precisely tailored products or services. Placing this in the context of a retailer, we’d see that as data flows in from point of sale systems, you could match buying patterns against social activity streams and map exactly what event triggered a spark of purchase in a specific region.

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