What is Big Data?
To begin with what exactly is Big Data? Well it's not as
complicated as one may think it's actually just that, Big Data or very large
amounts of data collected for an organization. Now when I say Big Date I mean
literally any event that can be captured in an organization. Put it this way,
imagine at US Airways every ticket purchased, every phone call made to customer
service, every login onto US Airways.com or usage on the app, every time you fly you scan
your ticket, you check your bag, if you register a complaint via email, text or even through social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc). Even the old fashioned way communicating in person to customer service or on the phone with them you’ve just initiated some data the organization can capture. Now
think of how many events a large organization can have in a single day, (especially
on days when things go wrong like when Jetblue shut down operations in 2007 stranding
thousands of passengers in a major snow storm in and start piling it up). The
amount of data can be overwhelming which is probably why the term Big Data came
about it’s literally Big Data.
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| Taken from Charlotte this is the same storm that shut JetBlue down. (photo credit to Brendt Hanson) |
What is it used for?
Once you have all this data collected and thanks to great technology
such as IBM’s Watson (a new supercomputer) it can be analyzed to do many
things. It can be used to predict buying behavior, develop new products, and
customize ads directed to you. Businesses are now deploying it ever more increasingly
to acquire new customers, retain existing ones thus growing the business. Does
a business ever read those complaints (surveys, emails, texts) you submit?
Maybe, maybe not; but this is another example where the technology is
used to process all the information to come up with improvements or find out
what the customer cares about most to ensure they get that right. Have you ever heard of
House of Cards the hit show on Netflix? According to webopedia.com Big Data
Analytics were used to analyze its subscriber data to come up with the essential
ingredients to make the hit show and bring back Arrested Development from
the cancelled show realm. Again this is more on the business side of things but
it’s even allowed researchers to decode the human DNA and predict where
terrorists plan to attack so it has major ramifications in the scientific community
as well as security and safety for the general public. Looking at the wide
array of uses already identified from analyzing Big Data, just imagine what else we
can do with it we haven’t even thought of the questions to ask yet.
What to expect?
This is the first in a series of 4 blogs to be posted on the topic Big Data and Analytics in which we will cover many other areas including security, recent developments to big data, and in closing the predictions of big data analytics and where it is expected to go in the future. I hope you enjoy the topic and information covered in this and the blogs to come and please feel free to leave comments on this posting and future posts.
What to expect?
This is the first in a series of 4 blogs to be posted on the topic Big Data and Analytics in which we will cover many other areas including security, recent developments to big data, and in closing the predictions of big data analytics and where it is expected to go in the future. I hope you enjoy the topic and information covered in this and the blogs to come and please feel free to leave comments on this posting and future posts.
