It is an estimation that more than 90% of today’s existing data has been created in the past 2 years. Approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day at the current pace. To top it up the overall revenue of the global Big Data market is estimated to touch USD$ 103 billion by 2027. This humongous amount of data comes from various sources such as smartphones, videos, text, audio, blogs, twitter feeds, wearable devices, scientific instruments, healthcare instruments, websites, financial institutions, and more.
Thus, Big Data, when coupled with conventional data sources, offers unmatched opportunities to understand humanity at high levels. Access to data science and Big Data Analytics has emerged as the game-changer for small enterprises, MSMEs as well as large organisations. Organisations that utilised small focus groups and general demographics data for their studies earlier have now started leveraging Big Data Analytics to extrapolate their target market activities.
Largely speaking, the players of the digital ecosystem have now started accessing specific information about their consumers and are now digitally transforming themselves by fine-tuning their marketing and sales targets. Big Data has thus helped companies to increase their ROI. Additionally, it solves almost every business-related problem with effective, working, and doable research-driven solutions.
But does everyone understand the term ‘Big Data’? Instead, it’s a scary term for a number of organisations because they don’t have the appropriate knowledge about how to convert this Big Data Analytics into useful information and leverage it for Digital Transformation.
What exactly is Big Data?
Roger Magoulasin, Director of market research at O’Reilly Media officially introduced the term ‘Big Data’ back in 2005. It referred to the enormous volumes of data that were beyond the processing capability of traditional data management practices. Big Data is known for its size, complexity, and independent sets. It was defined as the high potential data (volume, velocity, and information variety) that demanded innovative forms of information processing. The processed information thus extracted helped the companies to make strategic business & marketing decisions and enabled them to enjoy the complete digital transformation.
Why Big Data Analytics are key to Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation has helped organisations to embrace a positive change and stay updated in this competitive global environment. This is where Big Data steps in as a catalyst.
It allows companies to make calculated and strategic business decisions. It informs the company about granular information regarding consumers. For instance, what they are doing, the nature and frequency of buying, and projections for future planning. With this, companies can start implementing any necessary changes, required to cater to the current needs of the consumer. In a nutshell, integrating Big Data Analytics into your Digital Transformation strategy makes the Digital Transformation process complete.
Use of Big Data in Retail Industry
The retail industry has effectively leveraged Big Data in digitising and producing predictive models. These models have enabled leaders to make strategic decisions related to advertising budgets, sales, price discounts, and marketing. It has offered huge benefits to the industry by completely automating the analytics process. The automation of the analytics process has resulted in minimising costs, reducing delays, increased profit margins, and improved budget strategy.
With effective usage of app and web development services for necessary applications, companies have increased the usage of knowledge sharing tools, social media platforms, and enhanced collaboration methods for improved brand building and impact. Also, the fragmentation of functional silos in order to improve an organisation’s innovation capabilities has been facilitated by Big Data.
Let’s see an example where retail giants have utilised Big Data Analytics as a necessary tool for digital transformation. Amazon, the retail giant has effectively tapped the opportunities and profit potentials in order to develop increased business values. It launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) to design and offer end-to-end management services, and facilitate logistics, cloud computing, and secure payments. Big Data created an integrated supply chain management system (SCMS) as organisations digitised their product designs and included computer-aided algorithms and delivery tracking.
One of the leading Big Data companies investigated the impact of Big Data. This company found out how Amazon introduced a unique search option ‘search-inside-the-books’. With this feature, it generated results that included every single word inside the book. This feature improved the user’s reading experience.
Use of Big Data for Digital Transformation
When we talk about giant technology companies we not only talk about the workload that Big Data reduces. We talk also about the improvement in customer retention and satisfaction. A software giant utilises Big Data to conduct controlled experiments in order to improve its products and services.
A technology behemoth, on the other hand, boosts its sales and marketing processes by storing approximately 1.5 million customer records, received through big-data. With effective Digital Transformation, the company invests in the latest cutting-edge technologies to simplify the information sharing process and create operational transparency.
Thus, leveraging Big Data creates complex systems that segregate the business process into sectors that are based on data volumes. The company utilises the data to automate data storage. Then, it uses it effectively on various social media platforms that generate huge amounts of data.
Several engineering and Big Data companies integrate their engineering, manufacturing, and research processes with Big Data to reduce the time-to-market and accelerate their digital transformation.
Use in Public Institutions
Government institutions have heavily utilised Big Data in order to improve productivity, efficiency, and performance. A variety of digital monitoring tools such as dashboards, Scorecards, and KRAs execute the utilisation of Big Data.
The utilisation has helped them in streamlining their objectives and improving the efficiency of the overall system. Thus, it helped them to eradicate fraud and losses with automated fraud detection systems. These systems automatically detect all suspicious activities and criminal events.
Additionally, it has also led them to establish a trustworthy management structure that offers real-time support for any illegal happenings. It has been proven that public institutions powered by Big Data have performed more effectively and have been exceptionally successful in addressing the issues.
Conclusion
It thus becomes obvious that several behemoths have already been extracting the value of Big Data in terms of control, strategic decision making, improving efficiency, and offering complete customer satisfaction. These executional steps clearly depict that the intervention and utilisation of Big Data should not be limited at the organisational level instead it should further be extended at the departmental level, where there is a possibility of the teams focussing on a clear roadmap. This helps in identifying the exact business requirements externally as well internally, which in-fact is true digital transformation.
So, if you are a data-driven digital company, a sound Big Data Analytics strategy will fetch you results through data dimensions, utilisation & adoption. It will help you to leverage the speed and agility that Digital Transformation will deliver. Most importantly it will help you rope in modern-day technologies such as Blockchain or AI / ML to make better business decisions and outcomes.
Start your digital transformation journey today