Companies today have burgeoning levels of data being produced and consumed on a host of aspects like consumers and related information, financials, machinery and operations related data, etc. If you had to put this data together, it’s phenomenal so to speak.
For instance, Christopher Parretta – Executive Vice President and CIO of State Street Corp, a financial services company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S and present over 100 locations around the world – has a major problem that he has to come to terms with: The group has over $22.6 trillion in assets and $2.1 trillion in assets under management which translates to a lot of data.
IT experts know and believe in the fact that your business sustainability depends on your ability to mine, manage and analyze large data sets. Having access to the right data and the ability to interpret this data accurately in a timely manner is actually an asset that helps some companies actually take the lead in the market place.
Thomas L. Friedman, in his book The World is Flat, talks about how Walmart quickly rose to be one of the largest companies in the U.S based purely on the leverage it derives from the humongous expanse of data that flows in from every Walmart store in the U.S about every item/product that goes off the shelves of any store, all the time. This, in turn, enables Walmart to replenish supplies, notice and respond to trends, adapt to seasonal requirements, gain insights on customer behavior, and much more.
As such, managing “Big data sets” is a challenge, nonetheless. It’s certainly not an easy job thanks to the fact that the worldwide information volume is growing at least at the rate of 59% each year, according to Gartner.
Still wondering why you should even bother?
According to a report published by McKinsey Global Institute titled, “Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity”, You just need $600 to buy a disk drive of sorts to store all of the music ever generated in the world; there will be a whopping 5 billion mobile phones in use by the end of 2010; an incredible 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook alone each month; the U.S Library of Congress (let alone the entire world) alone collected about 235 TB data in April 2011.
So, what value does all this data have for businesses?
Here are some snippets for you:
For the U.S Healthcare alone, data alone is worth $300 billion – which is more than double the total annual health care spending in Spain; €250 Billion in value for the European Public Sector administration annually; a 60% potential increase in operating margins for retailers (remember the Walmart example mentioned above?); and finally, over 1.5 million new jobs
created.
Tesco, a British retailing company, swallows around 1.5 billion nuggets of data each month and Williams-Sonoma – an American retailer—encompasses the knowledge gained on roughly 60 million customers to produce its catalogues according to a feature titled “Building with Big Data ” on The Economist.
There isn’t a question that data is all-too important today. The question is: how do companies gather, mine, manage, analyze and store these humongous volumes of data? What does it entail for small, medium and large enterprises? Does Walmart’s master of retailing data and the ensuing “Big Box” revolution in supply chain management translate any lessons for other
businesses having to deal with reams of data?
Do let us know what you think. We’d love to hear from you.