October 17, 2014 - Building Your Big Data Analytics Roadmap

Big data is transforming the way we do business, and numbers go on to show that the impact of big data isn’t limited to a particular country or industry. According to a report by Gartner in 2013, organizations in the APAC region are aggressively pursuing big data investments, with 45% indicating that they plan to invest in big data within the next two years. In North America, 38% of organizations surveyed said they had already invested in big data technology with more planning to adopt big data in the future. Latin America is also adopting big data with 51% of organizations undertaking a big data initiative.

But, there are still many organizations in the process of figuring out how to make data work for them. Here are a few tips for how you can build your data analytics roadmap:

Invest in proven technology platforms

Technology platforms can help you analyze large volumes of data and deliver real-time insights. The preferred approach is to start small and build the business case, develop a roadmap and then make the technology investment.

Build and integrate the processes

Organizations are finding it difficult to act on even the simplest of insights delivered through information analysis because they have to deal with legacy processes, systems and complex teams. They must change their operating model so that the analytics process is not a singular function, but an integrated part of their business processes.

Don’t stop with the numbers

Most data available online is unstructured data, such as words and images. Scoring is an efficient way to analyze this data, but you can end up losing information when you reduce rich, qualitative data to a number. For example, when we analyze the views expressed by consumers on social platforms along with numeric data, the results can be used as guides for consumer problems, influences on buying behavior, and a host of other insights.

Keep digging for more insights

Dig deeper for more insights to metrics than the ones obtained from standard reporting tools. Understanding and analyzing all the variables involved gives you additional information and is critical for improving your market performance.