Big Data: a boon to business intelligence.

• Author: Ohata, Michael
• Position: TECH STRATEGY

The promise of Big Data is both enticing and overwhelming for leaders in every arena. For finance and information technology executives--who in recent years have achieved steady performance improvements in forecasting, business insight and predictive analytics--the challenges of harnessing Big Data's potential for revenue and profit enhancement is a significant challenge.

Over the past 10 years, business leaders have dealt with unprecedented change that has accelerated across the global economy--from entirely new business models to growing shareholder activism to ever-more powerful technology applications.

In the current business environment, users have a wide range of tools at their disposal, and their experience drives the expectation that corporate workers, not only consumers, connect through intelligent Internet-based applications for communication, data, transactions and taking action.

In the same way Internet search engines have proven they can find a good answer to sometimes cryptic queries, the data in systems hold the answers to questions yet unasked. The recent economic turmoil forced firms to recognize that, even in good economic conditions, growth does not preclude the need for tangible, accurate data and reliable, transparent analytic processes.

DATA AS PLATFORM

How should executives think about dealing with the promise of Big Data? The best place to start is not with the technologies of computing or analysis, but with the functional capabilities required to meet evolving business needs. As the celebrated mathematician and computer scientist Richard Hamming observed: "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers."

An approach with "data as a platform" and "analytics as a utility" is appropriate across industries and business models. Data emanating from multiple sources can be organized in a coherent platform, from which analytics can be tapped as needed--much like electricity is accessed from a power station.

An approach known as enterprise information management (EIM) can help pull it all together and enable organizations to enhance their institutional IQs to achieve greater agility and enhanced performance.

Big Data often connotes the vast stores of information that organizations house internally or in the cloud, typically the explosion of user transactional data that reveal the patterns and behaviors of consumers. IT has been talking about Big Data for a long time, referring to the growth velocity of data in systems and...