How to find out the commercial value of large data is more important

For all the big data commitments, the fundamental challenge of collecting large amounts of data from different sources is to find new business applications for this data, some IT managers said at the Phoenix Business Intelligence and Analysis Vision exhibition in the world of computing this week.

Technology vendors and industry analysts are promoting the business benefits of using unstructured data from clouds, mobile devices, social media channels and other sources to mix traditional structured data, according to some executives attending the show. However, executives do not know how to use large data or how to articulate their requirements to IT departments.

A confused IT manager says that business leaders usually don't know what they don't know. As a result, they cannot explain to the IT department what to do with all the data collected.

Over the past few years, private investors and venture capital firms have invested hundreds of millions of of dollars in startups that develop new technologies such as collecting, storing, organizing, and analyzing petabytes of structured and unstructured data.

These tools make it easier for organizations to extract data from a variety of data sources than before. These data sources include Web records, click Streams, social media, video and audio files, machine sensors, and Twitter-like microblogging sites.

"The real challenge is not the technology but the commercial value of all the data that can be collected," said Reid Nuttall, chief information officer at the Oklahoma energy Company, Ride Nator.

OGE has 9 power plants, providing electricity to 30,000 square kilometres of 758,000 users. The company has recently installed smart meters for its customers. The smart meter provides an ammeter reading every two hours, and the previous meter is a one-month meter reading.

Nuttall is optimistic that the large amount of data generated by smart meters will help the company analyze and influence user behavior and reduce peak demand over the next few years. He is looking for someone inside the company to start extracting business value from the data. "We have a lot of data," he said. We are trying to figure out what to do with the data. ”

Nuttall established an information "factory" and a Business Analysis skills Centre within the agency to help drive the creative application of the data processed by OGE. OGE is investing in business intelligence tools and new data visualization and presentation capabilities, allowing analysts to consider and use new data in different ways. Big data is forcing it and business intelligence teams together to explore ways to harness new data.

Payroll processing company ADP is taking the same approach. The company builds an innovative lab that manages how to store, process, and analyze extremely large amounts of data.

Roberto Masiero, vice president of the ADP Innovation Lab, said in a speech that the idea was to create an environment in which experts from different industries and different backgrounds could collaborate to Roberto Macherot large data analysis issues.

William Herridge, general manager of Tribune's emerging solutions, said in a sense that what was going on was reminiscent of the first time the company started using online analytical processing tools. "When we turn to OLAP (online analytics), it's hard for business users to overcome their current habit of using list data," he said. Before you show them this application, they don't know the value of OLAP. "It organizations face the same challenges with large data.

Herich said: "We see this value. However, it is a huge challenge for users to understand and see this value, especially when dealing with concepts such as unstructured data. Before enterprise users see some benefits, they will not register large data items. ”

The most difficult part of using large data is to have business leaders and executives sit down, Digital Learning FX, a partner at Texas, a digital learning solutions company in Irvine, said. Determine what they want from the vast amount of unstructured and semi-structured data they get from their enterprise.

Ratner said the mistake was ours because it did not specify what value the enterprise could get out of the big data. For a long time, organizations still did not collect or use unstructured data because they did not know business value, not because of technical reasons.

Unless we can define the value of big data, or the business leaders tell us what they want from the big data, we're just groping in the dark.

The mood is the same as the sentiment expressed by respondents in a recent survey conducted by market research firm Theinfopro. A survey of 255 IT pros shows that most companies do not have big data plans because they do not have specific business reasons for such a plan. (Compiled/Populus euphratica)

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)