Big Data: uses the “Next Best Thing” for data collection

In 2012, IDC, a global leader in the field of IT and telecoms and BI, published a study called “THE DIGITAL UNIVERSE IN 2020: Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and Biggest Growth in the Far East” in which he highlighted the understanding of the uses of Digital by 2020 CIOs and users. Here are the next steps that emerged from this study:

Data collection … and what comes next?

For some, Big Data represents an evolution of the data management infrastructure. This challenges 3V: exploding data volumes, operating and crossing of real-time data, application of complex data processing on the protean structures… without doubt this is a significant technological breakthrough, but the same order other disruptions that computer directions have experienced in the past.

From the perspective of data volumes, there is nothing really revolutionary in the respect of Moore’s Law. From the point of view of speed of analysis, it is a real innovation in performance and in the freedom of manipulating information.
For others, it is still difficult to establish a formal link between access to the data and the concrete benefits in the performance of their activities.

The majority of business users have an endemic need data analysis. A new treatment of the given approach can satisfy their needs by analyzing structured and unstructured information. The promise is there, but there is gap between the concept and practice.

A technical promise is realized:

If the technological promise may take several years. This is certainly the biggest challenge of Big Data and the same time a great opportunity to revisit, renew and reinvent how to ask business questions and new answers with the support of new techniques and methods analysis.

All academic, public and industrial actors already working and already in the design of new analysis methodologies, new cognitive representations of the results, new algorithms. The machine is on and the number of researchers have already created models in specific areas or uses such as smart home, the city connected, optimized consumption of energy or health.

The Data Analyst example project that brings together seven industrial and academic partners to discover, test, implement and apply big data. Their goal is to create Big Data applications and build an intelligent warehouse with heterogeneous and massive data from consumers, public data, search engines and measuring devices.

There is a challenge to be met in all areas:

The interest of Big Data comes last in the subjects treated in the way of understanding and solving problems in transverse areas (marketing, logistics, risk management …) or in specialized areas (health, energy, distribution …)

Marketing has naturally raised the forefront of trades involved in Big Data. LesGAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) or Microsoft have not shown how to create gigantic referencing databases accurately and permanently for individuals, their identity, their behavior, their feelings, their relationships and preferences by exploiting the available information, or even causing their creation.

The company must appropriate this phenomenon to avoid data grip with new “Infomediaries” to understand the needs of its customers and interact with them. The consumer uses more than official channels made available to companies. The company has no choice but to take ownership of this open world: information literacy is a prerequisite for achieving this.

Some companies have engaged in the arena but many have not been successful. In the hotel, catering or transportation business, we already know the considerable influence that can have negative comments on social networks or sites such as TripAdvisor or Yelp. Treat considerable masses of unstructured external data, and react quickly to deal with potential crisis situations is no longer an option in these sectors.

Other sectoral variations are emerging; health will probably be one of the territories concerned, not only in research and development, but also in communicating medical equipment that will revolutionize the real-time management of the patient and telemedicine services. In the public sector, the city becomes intelligent and communicating and new means are available address complex issues such as the deployment of resources to the fight against crime.

Information becomes a valuable factor to the citizen and the economy. Financial institutions are themselves, of course, also concerned, particularly for the risk management and real-time fraud who should benefit from better long-term forecasting capabilities.

The biggest challenge for all these industries is the matching of their information systems in order to implement these new uses from the analysis of large data masses.