Big Data is much talked about and is becoming increasingly useful as new methodologies are developed to measure and analyse data for business intelligence and decision making purposes.
Big Data usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process data within a tolerable elapsed time, but all this is changing with new tools and methodologies.
Since this winter Bearing has become an industrial partners of the Data ScienceTech Institute in Sophia Antipolis, a private French professional education institute. Bearing will help to develop and teach courses where we can apply our knowledge of innovation to the new tools of data science. Our focus as a strategy and management consultancy is on innovation, and Big Data analytics enables new ways to innovate that we expect to be of major importance.
Business companies need strategic plans for collecting and organizing data, plans that aligns with the business strategy of how they will use that data to create value. The opportunity to deploy advanced analytics to outperform the competition is real, and top-performing companies see themselves as more effective in every aspect of analytics, including capturing, collecting and storing data, as well as parsing and drawing insights from it.
In many industries, Big Data is becoming a critically important driver of competitive advantages for business success. Access to data and digital disruption is changing “the rules of the game” and digital is affecting entire value chains, from digital marketing to enhanced customer experience, from multi-channel CRM to product co-creation, from e-procurement to 3D prototyping.
We live in a world defined by urbanization and digital ubiquity, where mobile broadband connections outnumber fixed ones, machines dominate a new "internet of things," and more people live in cities than in the countryside.
Cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.
Planning and design of cities are increasingly using information technologies. A century ago, the telegraph and the mechanical tabulator were used to tame cities of millions. Today, cellular networks and cloud computing tie together the complex choreography of mega-regions of tens of millions of people.
In Chicago, GPS sensors on snow plows feed a real-time "plow tracker" map that everyone can access. In Zaragoza, Spain, a "citizen card" can get you on the free city-wide Wi-Fi network, unlock a bike share, check a book out of the library, and pay for your bus ride home. In New York, a guerrilla group of citizen-scientists installed sensors in local sewers to alert you when stormwater runoff overwhelms the system, dumping waste into local waterways.
But the potential for information technology is still in a very early stage across most functions, which allows for organisations with foresight to achieve rapid innovative development of competitive advantages.
Kenneth Cukier, the Data Editor of The Economist, made a TED talk about Big Data in June 2014, which can be seen here below. Cukier is the co-author of "Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Work, Live and Think" (2013) and "Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education" (2014) with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger.