Big Data – your competitive advantage

Within our fast-changing economy, enormous amounts of data are created each day. We are online everywhere and everyday. Doing so we leave a large trace of data which is higly valuable for companies.

Specifically, these data traces allow companies to grasp the changes and characteristics just as they are happening. It is, therefore, not surprising that data is now a key factor across all economic sectors.
However, as this data is frequently unstructured and very large, traditional statistical tools are often unsuitable for analysis. But this won’t be the end of all days…

You probably already came across the term “Big Data”. Big Data is the concept behind many of the significant economic transformations that happen today. It refers to large (mainly) unstructured data sets, examples of which are posts on social media sites or sensor data.

Modern Big Data processing solutions allow companies to analyze such unstructured data sets, providing them with a competitive advantage. Big Data technology’s points of use include but are not limited to risk management, data-driven decision-making, and identification of customer needs.

Given the wide range of applications, it is hardly surprising that Big Data has moved into the limelight over the past few decades. Already back in 2011, a report published by McKinsey estimated that using big data to the full has the potential to raise a wide range of KPIs by 60% and bring billions of dollars of added value to various economic sectors.

Therefore the ever-increasing use of data offers various opportunities for companies as well as people.
However, it can also lead to an increase in inequalities as the ability to harness value from data is highly dependent on economics of scale.

Authors such as Jin et al. (2015) state that Big Data can be best characterized by 5Vs, which are:

In today’s world, there is a large Volume of (unstructured) data. 

This data is generated from a Variaty of sources (e.g., sensor data, smartphone data)

In order to analyze these large sets of data, high computing power and, therefore Velocity is needed.

Higher data quality will increase the Validity of your results.

The Value arising from the usage of Big Data can be very diverse.

References

Jin, X. et al., 2015. Significance and Challenges of Big Data Research. Big Data Research, 2(2), pp.59–64.