Until recently, the torrent of data flooding our world has been a phenomenon that probably only excited a few data geeks. But we are now at an inflection point.
The history of previous trends in IT investment and innovation and their impact on competitiveness and productivity strongly suggest that big data can have a similar power.
The same preconditions that allowed previous waves of IT-enabled innovation to power productivity – technology innovations followed by the adoption of complementary management innovations – are in place for big data, and used correctly, big data can equal big profits.
Mark Gillon, business development manager at Altech ISIS, points out that big data isn’t just a matter of storing as much information as possible just for the sake of doing so – because then retrieving what you need becomes a major operation. It’s about quality over quantity and mining what you need.
Speaking at the recent TM Forum Africa Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, alongside representatives from Google and Amazon, Gillon said that big data analytics has immense potential in identifying what
services companies should offer, when and to which customers.
“Gaining a better understanding of which customers to target, when and how is only the starting point of the value offered by big data. All companies need to take big data and its potential seriously if they want to compete,” Gillon says.
According to research from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) and McKinsey & Company’s Business Technology Office, the sheer volume of data generated, stored, and mined for insights has become economically relevant to businesses, government, and consumers.
Gillon’s presentation, centred around the topic Data: The competitive currency of the 21st century, discussed how big data can be used to gaining a better understanding of which customers to target, when and how; as well as how organisations can become more collaborative and create internal and external social ecosystems.
This was done through an exploration of how TM Forum’s Frameworx can provide the underpinning business process, information and application definitions and interfaces essential to enabling the analytics that will allow companies to leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value.
The TM Forum Frameworx is a suite of best practices and standards that provides the blueprint for effective, efficient business operations. It enables businesses to assess and optimise performance using a proven, service-oriented approach to operations and integration.
Frameworx has been widely adopted and proven to significantly improve agility in IT and operations, resulting in increased margins and optimal customer experience.
“The TM Forum has written almost 30 use cases around big data, ranging from revenue assurance and fraud prevention to churn reduction,” Gillon explains.
“Each use case provides a blueprint on how to implement and execute a big data strategy in different areas of an organisation’s information architecture. The absolute strength of these use cases is that they provide a clear and effective way to turn theory into practice and knowledge into revenue.”
