Data Driven or Drive the Data
BIG DATA, fascinating subject. You can read a lot about it everywhere, it´s kind of a boom right now, and every company, no matter if it is a small or a big company is either working towards BIG DATA or just using BIG DATA for certain projects. One of the main reasons why such a wide spread of companies use BIG DATA, is because if you have the right resources this tool is totally accessible for everyone, and may change radically the performance of your business. What has happened is amazing, if we bear in mind that the first tool for BIG DATA was used and implemented in 2005.
BIG DATA is undoubtedly a “powerful tool and concept”, which may transform your business 180 degrees and show you things you have never imagined.
However, when you go deeper into about how this technology is applied in different companies, you find different points of view and different uses for BIG DATA.
BIG DATA is undoubtedly a “powerful tool and concept”, which may transform your business 180 degrees and show you things you have never imagined. We should never forget, though, that it is only a tool unless you have a company that provides BIG DATA services.
So, shall we encourage our company to invest in BIG DATA? Of course, but only if BIG DATA will solve a real problem or will expand your business scope. Remember BIG DATA, no matter how accessible, it´s not cost free.
We can use BIG DATA for mostly everything today, from the very simplest project such as business insights, preventive maintenance or travel preferences, to making a computer feel human and be able to learn and interact with humans.
One important aspect we shouldn’t forget about is that it’s us who must be in control of such a powerful tool. We usually talk about DATA DRIVEN COMPANIES, which means that companies are internally prepared to develop BIG DATA Projects. A DATA DRIVEN company has the right systems to collect, maintain, organize, and secure data, but it also has the right human resources to do so and to process the Data afterwards.
Remember that even though we are talking about AI, human resources are still a key aspect in using and deploying BIG DATA. This is very important because it is predicted that there will be a shortage of human resources, especially Data Engineers, in the future and this will increase our costs if we want to become a Data Driven Company.
That’s why it is important to do an assessment to understand where our company is standing towards BIG DATA, and be smart enough to allocate the right resources right away.
What does this mean? Usually when we do an assessment about how Data Driven our company is, we will find aspects to improve and to change regarding processes, systems, or even our teams. If our company is completely digitized and our processes of treating data are well defined, this assessment will focus mostly on improving and not on changing, but if we have a company where manual processes are still used, the challenge ahead can become quite hard. Therefore, if our company have already gone through a Digital Transformation process, starting an Analytical Transformation Process towards BIG DATA will be much easier.
This is the point to understand that BIG DATA is a tool and not to rush into decisions that may affect the course our business. As we all know whenever we deploy a system or migrate to a new one, no matter what the reason behind that decision is, we face a lot of resistance and challenges. Resistance from our legacy systems that need to be replace for new ones, from our people but also from our customers.
So, we need to Drive the Data, we need to take control of how to use these powerful tools and not the way around. The smartest companies are the ones that understand this and empower their business with the right tools, and not those which enforce the business to behave the way a system tells as to do.
Always complete define the problem or the challenge ahead first. Look for the resources inside your company that will allow you to resolve that problem. Do a benchmarking to understand what others do to resolve similar problems or define your own path to the solution and establish a starting point and destination.
Pick up the right tools and the right resources. If you don´t have them or you are not sure if you have them, you can always do an external assessment to understand where your company is standing. Always consider at least two solutions to your problem and never take away from the equation the impact of the process to the solution in the right flow of your business.
Shall I considerer to outsource BIG DATA? Of course you can, there are a lot of companies that can help you with that, but remember that key to succeed in a BIG DATA project is to fully understand the business. So this means that you will have to be totally open to explain to your partner your business. You have to find a partner to which you will trust the understanding of your business or otherwise outsource only part of the job, if you don´t feel comfortable with that.
To walk towards a Digital & Analytical transformation is quite a challenge, it may require changes and adaptation, but the result is incredible. Once you start making decision on real information, the decision process becomes much more effective and you will star seeing cost improvements and increases in performance. And why is that? Well, the simplest reason is because we start diminishing uncertainty.
Intuition is and will be a great tool in the decision process, BIG DATA does not replace intuition, but improves it. When we model data and we can run and deploy statiscal regression models, that can tell us and predict different scenarios in the future that can be associated with great amount of variables will make the decision easier and though we can still use intuition, we can use it for the best suitable scenario.
So, Drive the Data, what those it means? When we decide that the data that we generate within our company and that data available outside the company has a value and will represent and impact in our profit, we should take action. When we say that a company should Drive the Data, means that we should put data within our decision process so that we can make that process more reliable. To Drive the Date means that we should manage the data, from the extraction till the visualization of the final information we are looking for. When we Drive the Data we shall have a starting point but most important a destination towards where o what we are driven data to.
So, finally, the world is changing rapidly, 70% of the total data generated in the world was generated during last 5 years, we expect to multiply the amount of data by more than twice for 2025. With all that data been generated and available to us, we should take the first step at once and start working within our company towards BIG DATA, driven the data to improve our business, before the change is enforced to us.
