In the past 5 years big data was one of the most often used buzz words for marketing and sales but not a lot of people said specifically what big data is and what you can do with it. This blog post will explain from where you get big data and how you should manage it to get knowledge.
What is big data?
The following list contains some objects for which big data is collected.
- People
- Products
- Facts
Further big data is selling data, orders, line items, discounts, click data, sensor data etc. A new type of data is data from mobile phones that make it possible to know where people are going.
The important point is that all these data is not new. The important point is that the growth of this data is exponential and it is not possible anymore to analyze this data manually. You need smart systems that are showing you the most important and interesting parts.
The attached graphic below shows the growth of the internet host since 1981. It includes a prediction how this is going to continue. As you can see the growth is exponential. Like the hosts in the internet the usage of the internet is growing at the same pace. If you did not automize your knowledge extracting strategy and if you are still doing this manually you might miss interesting parts of your data.
Internet Growth of Hosts from 1981 – 2012 including prediction unti 2018
From big data to knowledge
Data alone is useless. It just means that you measured a lot but you do not really know what to do with these data points. You need something which is capable to extract knowledge out of this big ball of mud. Most of the current solutions are drawing nice pictures and graphs for you and you have to decide what to do with these information.
One big issue about graphs is that you can fake a lot. There are tricks like only showing a cut off of the axes or to choosing a log scale axis. So if you are a smart data scientist your statistics is always support your statement.
What you need is a solution that is not only extracting knowledge but is directly using this knowledge to take optimal decisions in your company.
Next generation systems like the Incentergy platform are automatically taken optimal decisions with minimal loss and are just informing you how much money you made.
What is actable knowledge?
We call this extracted knowledge actable knowledge. For example one actable knowledge would be if you know the probability of the gender of your target group. Lets assume your are selling premium beer and you just figured out that 80% of your customers are men. This can directly be used to optimize the promotion that is shown on the first page.
Further actable knowledge are automatic business rules like you discovered that young people are going to pay their bills in average 3 weeks later then older people. You can use this knowledge to forbid the payment method invoice for young people.
This actable knowledge can be extracted from your current data and directly be integrated into your processes.
Workflow to extract actable knowledge from big data.
If you want to get more information how we can help you automizing your knowledge extraction and acting. Feel free to contact us.