The AI Research and Consultancy Company
BigData, Big Returns
Let Your Data Work For You
SOFTWARE CONSULTING AND DEVELOPMENT
FOR YOUR DIGITAL SUCCESS
To really understand big data, it’s helpful to have some historical background. Here is Gartner’s definition, circa 2001 (which is still the go-to definition): Big data is data that contains greater variety arriving in increasing volumes and with ever-higher velocity. This is known as the three Vs.
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Put simply, big data is larger, more complex data sets, especially from new data sources. These data sets are so voluminous that traditional data processing software just can’t manage them. But these massive volumes of data can be used to address business problems you wouldn’t have been able to tackle before.
The AI Foundation aid your business in the process of deploying a successful BigData Roadmap that will impact your business performance.
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Wikibon predicted a 17 percent compound annual growth rate for big data software over the next 10 years. Using the data and insights captured with big data solutions, companies are finding new ways to improve current business operations, uncover insights, and drive unexpected efficiencies.
The AI Foundation team introduces project check-ups to make sure the development goes smoothly, foresee causes of possible failures and determine ways to get the project off the ground.
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We do our utmost to help your business obtain the right technology solution to overcome hurdles to success. Whether your needs are to enhance the existing system or to implement a new custom solution, we are here as your trusted partner.
How Big Data Works
Big data gives you new insights that open up new opportunities and business models. Getting started involves three key actions:
Integrate
Manage
Analyze
Big data brings together data from many disparate sources and applications. Traditional data integration mechanisms, such as ETL (extract, transform, and load) generally aren’t up to the task. It requires new strategies and technologies to analyze big data sets at terabyte, or even petabyte, scale.
During integration, you need to bring in the data, process it, and make sure it’s formatted and available in a form that your business analysts can get started with.
Big data requires storage. Your storage solution can be in the cloud, on premises, or both. You can store your data in any form you want and bring your desired processing requirements and necessary process engines to those data sets on an on-demand basis. Many people choose their storage solution according to where their data is currently residing. The cloud is gradually gaining popularity because it supports your current compute requirements and enables you to spin up resources as needed.
Your investment in big data pays off when you analyze and act on your data. Get new clarity with a visual analysis of your varied data sets. Explore the data further to make new discoveries. Share your findings with others. Build data models with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Put your data to work.
Big Data Best Practices
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To help you on your big data journey, we’ve put together some key best practices for you to keep in mind. Here are our guidelines for building a successful big data foundation.
Align Big Data with Specific Business Goals
More extensive data sets enable you to make new discoveries. To that end, it is important to base new investments in skills, organization, or infrastructure with a strong business-driven context to guarantee ongoing project investments and funding. To determine if you are on the right track, ask how big data supports and enables your top business and IT priorities. Examples include understanding how to filter web logs to understand ecommerce behavior, deriving sentiment from social media and customer support interactions, and understanding statistical correlation methods and their relevance for customer, product, manufacturing, and engineering data.
Optimize Knowledge Transfer with a Center of Excellence
Use a center of excellence approach to share knowledge, control oversight, and manage project communications. Whether big data is a new or expanding investment, the soft and hard costs can be shared across the enterprise. Leveraging this approach can help increase big data capabilities and overall information architecture maturity in a more structured and systematic way.
Plan Your Discovery Lab for Performance
Discovering meaning in your data is not always straightforward. Sometimes we don’t even know what we’re looking for. That’s expected. Management and IT needs to support this “lack of direction” or “lack of clear requirement.”
At the same time, it’s important for analysts and data scientists to work closely with the business to understand key business knowledge gaps and requirements. To accommodate the interactive exploration of data and the experimentation of statistical algorithms, you need high-performance work areas. Be sure that sandbox environments have the support they need—and are properly governed.
Ease Skills Shortage with Standards and Governance
One of the biggest obstacles to benefiting from your investment in big data is a skills shortage. You can mitigate this risk by ensuring that big data technologies, considerations, and decisions are added to your IT governance program. Standardizing your approach will allow you to manage costs and leverage resources. Organizations implementing big data solutions and strategies should assess their skill requirements early and often and should proactively identify any potential skill gaps. These can be addressed by training/cross-training existing resources, hiring new resources, and leveraging consulting firms.
Top Payoff Is Aligning Unstructured with Structured Data
It is certainly valuable to analyze big data on its own. But you can bring even greater business insights by connecting and integrating low density big data with the structured data you are already using today.
Whether you are capturing customer, product, equipment, or environmental big data, the goal is to add more relevant data points to your core master and analytical summaries, leading to better conclusions. For example, there is a difference in distinguishing all customer sentiment from that of only your best customers. Which is why many see big data as an integral extension of their existing business intelligence capabilities, data warehousing platform, and information architecture.
Keep in mind that the big data analytical processes and models can be both human- and machine-based. Big data analytical capabilities include statistics, spatial analysis, semantics, interactive discovery, and visualization. Using analytical models, you can correlate different types and sources of data to make associations and meaningful discoveries