Six Tips to Succeed with Big Data

With the proliferation of digital computing devices and the explosion of social media sites and excellent internet access, large amounts of public data are being generated regularly. Effective techniques and algorithms that analyze this data provide near real-time information, which is being used to understand evolving trends and alert people about imminent emergencies.

Mining data can help develop many useful insights of political and socio-economic events, which allows people create sound public policies. The focus of this post is to guide you through Big Data tools and techniques so you can make the most of it and can improve your bottom line.

The growing ability to use big data techniques for development helps revolutionize education, agriculture and other spheres of life that can help improve people’s standards of living. While Big Data offers many benefits, its diverse nature offers many challenges to scientists and analysts alike. The pressing concerns apply to efficient data acquisition and sharing, developing of context and integrity of a dataset, and promising privacy.

Tools for big data analysis

There are five key approaches to analyzing big data and developing insights:

• Discovery tools are helpful during the information life cycle for fast, intuitive mining and analysis of information from any set of structured and unstructured sources. These tools allow analysis along with traditional BI source systems. As there is no requirement for up-front modeling, and users can develop new insights, come to right conclusions, and make informed decisions speedily.
• BI tools are essential for reporting, performance management, and analysis particularly with transactional data from data warehouses along with production information systems. BI tools grant capabilities for BI and performance management, involving dashboards, enterprise reporting, ad-hoc analysis, scorecards, and what-if framework analysis on an enterprise scale platform. Businesses must take advantage of machine learning. It is the best way to succeed with human level-AI, and a machine learning course can help you learn more.
• In-database analytics encompasses different techniques to discover patterns and relationships in data. As these methods are applied to the database, you remove data movement to and from various analytical servers, which speed up information cycle times and minimize total cost of ownership.
• Hadoop is used for pre-processing data to find macro trends or pieces of information, like out-of-range values. It allows unveiling potential value from new data using affordable commodity servers. Most businesses mainly use Hadoop as a precursor to advanced forms of analytics.
• Decision Management encompasses predictive modeling, self-learning, and business rules to take action based on the current context. This type of analysis leads to recommendations throughout multiple channels, increasing the importance of every customer interaction.

Here are six tips that can help you understand how to effectively leverage the power of Big Data for your company.

1. Begin with small

Big data projects, in most organizations, get their start when an employer gets convinced that the company is not receiving opportunities in data.

Big data analytics can be performed with the software tools primarily used as part of robust analytics disciplines like data mining and predictive analytics. You are likely to find many unknowns when working with data that your organization has not used before, for instance, the bulk of unstructured information from the web. Which parts of the data carry value? What is the important metrics the data can provide? What are quality issues? Due to these unknowns, the time and costs required to get success can be difficult to predict.

So it’s better to start small. Start by defining a simple analytics that won’t take time or data to run.

2. Understand your company’s requirements 

Is your company ready for Big Data tools and solutions or not? If it takes a day or even more to achieve data inputs and analysis on essential business activity, then it isn’t. This slow process can hamper the effectiveness of business decisions and badly affect revenues and returns.

Companies face a data dilemma when disruptors try to change the game or when adjacent industries are already making most of Big Data. The increased velocity of competition makes companies accept Big Data. The precision analytics in Big Data helps ‘nowcast’ instead of ‘forecast’ situations.

3. Budget for flexibility

Many companies over-estimate the number of reports they want as part of their new analytics, and this can be costly on the grounds of third-party development fees. It is highly cost-effective to assign the budget to craft a ‘self-service’ solution which allows users to make their reports as the need crops up.

 4. The executive dashboard should be your priority

 A user-friendly interface that delivers the right information to senior managers as fast as possible is the key to ensure that the system is used extensively. Data interpretation and data visualization experts can help develop a neat and efficient dashboard.

5. Follow Big Data experts

According to the CEO of Semcasting, Ray Kingman, enterprises must use Big Data firms instead of performing it all out on their own.

He added, “Retailers with many consumers, financial services enterprises and some technology-driven companies are leveraging the analytic side and developing some baseline performance and higher ROI expectations.” “These businesses are describing efficient tools while making analytics a simpler concept, thus making it possible for businesses to use them.”

According to Kingman, “Big Data tools will be accessible beyond the lab and will get their way into the system of marketing, product development, and the sales processes of the industry.”

He also believes that the Big Data collection phase is likely to become commoditized, and there is a high probability that portions of the analytics could become off-the-shelf products.

6. Use a solution-oriented approach

Though many advancements have been made in the Hadoop ecosystem over the years, it is still budding as a platform that can be employed in production business deployments. A dire need for enterprise technology initiatives is likely to evolve and be a ‘work in progress.’

Software evaluators will not get one off-the-shelf tool that covers all present and forward-looking Hadoop analytics requirements. Without over focusing on the term ‘future proofing’, extensibility and scalability should be a vital part of all project checklists.

The capability to port transformations to run consistently across different Hadoop distributions is an advantage. But complete durability needs an overall platform approach to scalability, which is line with the open innovation that is driving the Hadoop ecosystem.

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