- Are you wanting to understand how you can use Big Data to improve your Organizational Effectiveness?
- Is understanding what Big Data IS, and how it fits into your existing data structures a concern for you?
- Is turning your Big Data into Business Value a challenge for you right now?
Big Data is a term that applies to information that “can’t be processed or analysed using traditional processes or tools”. The term “Big Data” does not, or should not, imply that earlier or pre-existing forms of data were “small”, or that the only challenge is the size, or amount, of data. Neither of these is true. But we have become accustomed to “throwing away” up to 80% of available data, just because we don’t have the ability to save and analyse it effectively. Big Data changes that and enables us to now use 80% and MORE of the data available to us for effective organizational decision-making.
A recent e-book from IBM on understanding Big Data explains what Big Data is, and how it is already being used for Organizational Effectiveness, and offers suggestions on how it may help you.
A survey, also by IBM, found that over half of the business leaders today realise that they don’t have access to the insights they need to do their jobs well – despite the fact that today’s business has more access to potential insight than ever before.
So, if Big Data is about information that needs different processes that you don’t already have, when does using Big Data make the most sense? It makes most sense when:
- You need to analyse not only raw structured data, but semi-structured and unstructured data from a wide variety of sources.
- You need to analyse all or most of the data available, as opposed to a sample of the data; or a sampling of data isn’t nearly as effective as a larger set of data from which to derive analysis.
- Business measures from data are not predetermined, or not known, and you need to “discover” these through iterative and exploratory analysis.
Below are some ideas of how Big Data can be used to create Business Value that results in Organizational Effectiveness.
- Social Media and Customer Sentiment. Big Data can be used to figure out what customers are saying about the organization (and perhaps what they are saying about competitors), and use this to figure out how this sentiment impacts the decisions you’re making and the way your company engages with its customers. Big Data can give insight into:
- How sentiment is impacting sales
- The effectiveness or receptiveness of your marketing campaigns,
- The accuracy of your marketing mix
- Predicting customer and competitor sentiment and reaction to marketing and product campaigns.
- Fraud Detection. Big Data provides greater opportunity to do more about identifying and/or stopping fraud. Results that have been experienced include:
- Reduced time between fraud and detection by up to 97%
- Broaden models for fraud detection by 50%
- Apply fraud detection models to predict fraud incidents and prevent them from happening.
- IT Log Analytics. Big Data uses data that is, under normal circumstances, purged, to extract value from it. Such as:
- Click-stream data that records every gesture, click and movement made on a website.
- Opportunities for computer system optimisation and tuning
- Reduce problem resolution time by accurately identifying system errors, at component level
- Reduce problems from occurring by predicting the likelihood of problems, and preventing them at source.
- Call Centre quality assurance. Big Data can be used to better understand and predict customer responses, such as:
- Understand what callers are saying before the organisation takes action
- Improve effectiveness by understanding caller discontent and operator responses
- Reduce customer churn rate and improve conversion rates
- Correlate with other data to establish why customers are cancelling before they cancel so that preventative action can be taken.
- Risk Modelling and Management. Big Data, by the ability to use more information from disparate sources, improves the ability to:
- Predict risks and probabilities in order to implement effective mitigation before a risk occurs.
- Alternative Energy. Even in new “green fields” applications, Big Data can be used to analyse environments from multiple sources of information to enable decision making that leads to improved Organizational Effective, such as:
- Optimal placement of wind turbines based on location-dependent factors.
- Workforce Intelligence. The workforce is an area rich in Big Data that can be used to understand and predict Organizational Effectiveness.
- Understand workforce related actions that drive Organizational Effectiveness
- Understand which workforce interventions give the best return on investment
- Predict organizational performance based on workforce actions and interventions.
These are some ideas of what Big Data is and what analysing Big Data can do for YOUR business.
To download the IBM ebook on Understanding Big Data, click here.
To learn more about how Big Data can be applied for better Workforce Intelligence, give TalentAlign a call.