Big Data
[Flash Research Paper Assignment for MIS 2501, Enterprise IT Architecture – Spring 2013]
By implementing a “big data” management system, our company will be able to improve decision-making and increase profitability. Understanding our customer data is crucial to surviving in today’s competitive marketplace. Through big data, we will be able to analyze our customers’ preferences, attitudes toward products, and enhance performance in various departments of our organization.
Big data management systems capture, store, organize, analyze, and visualize the large, complex customer data sets that we collect through transactions and analytics. Its main focus is to increase insight into process optimization, and helps to develop new business models to adapt to today’s increasingly digital marketplace. By making sense of information, big data can establish patterns and solutions to enhance decision-making. For example, big data can be used to leverage social media data to analyze customers’ responses to products and services and make the necessary improvements based on this customer information. Furthermore, big data can be used to expose variability and increase operational efficiency by keeping detailed log of operations such as product inventories.
To prepare our company for future market competition, a big data management system is essential. It will make us more data-driven, resulting in increased sales and profitability because we will know how to effectively serve our markets. There are four stages of big data (Figure 1). The first two steps are basic functions that serve to collect and store the data. In the third and fourth steps, the technology allows us to critically analyze the data in useful ways to benefit our organization. We should implement the fourth stage of big data. It will provide us a large competitive advantage so we may act on critical data quicker than competitors.
Figure 1
Works Cited
“BigDataBytes.” Big Data Management Maturity Curve. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Feb. 2013.
Beyer, Lapkin, et al. “’Big Data’ Is Only the Beginning of Extreme Information Management.” Gartner. 7 April 2011.
“Leveraging the Benefits of ‘Big Data'” Leveraging the Benefits of ‘Big Data’ N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Feb. 2013.
“McKinsey Global Institute.” Big Data: The next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Feb. 2013.