Keystone usecases for Big Data technology

“The lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change.” – Andy Grove 

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.” – Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President, Gartner Research

 There is widespread recognition and understanding that Big Data is not a technology challenge or a data management problem but rather a business opportunity. The last few posts effectively highlighted that the 4 challenges associated with the 4 V’s preclude conventional IT solutions to managing & harnessing that precious commodity of business data.

While Big Data as an amorphous technology space is evolving and means different things to different groups within IT, the business insights that are gleaned from it help one outperform competition. All of this leads to the conclusion that Data is an enterprise asset and should be managed as one. Data silos follow organizational silos and effectively putting an end to this mindset only improves organizational collaboration,

With this in mind, I have tried to capture 17 proven horizontal use-cases (both customer facing and internal) for Big Data. These are horizontal in the sense that they’re common as a trend (and an opportunity) to virtually every industry vertical – financial services, healthcare, telecom etc.

1. Improve customer satisfaction
2. Detect Fraud before, as it & after it happens
3. Deal with device data (read sensors, IoT etc)
4. Unified log processing
5. Improve enterprise security
6. Engagement via social media
7. Google search my corporate data haystack
8. Single view of artifact – customer, patient, supplier etc
9. Build a picture of your customer over time
10. Manage Risk
11. Augment my data warehouse
12. Stay compliant with regulation
13. Break down organizational silos
14. Personalize business services to customers
15. Analytics @ speed
16. Dynamically adjust offerings – portfolios, product pricing, promotions etc
17. Digitally transform my business

I will be elaborating on each of these over this week describing the use-case & real world customer scenarios.