Data is everywhere; everywhere except where it should be. Moreover, with the rapid growth of data volumes across a myriad of sources, including social media, business systems, e-mail and mobile phones, organisations are increasingly losing grip over these primal untapped assets, says Johann Evans, chief technical officer of Cherry Olive, the unified data management specialists – and the sponsors of the Customer Experience Summit, held in Cape Town at the end of April.
Speaking at the Summit, Evans said customer interaction bread-crumb trails spread over an organisation’s topology are hollow in their individual capacity, but the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
“But there are definite ways to unify a corporation’s data by simply utilising open industry standards and laying down governance to create a rapid road to maturity of one’s information assets – while at the same time eradicating the hype-cloud of technology to reveal the instant business value attainable by augmenting and capitalising of one’s existing technology investments.”
Commenting further, Evans said the global economy – and businesses – are faced with a “total overflow of information”.
Currently 2,7Zb of data exists in the digital world today: Walmart handles more than 1-million customer transactions every hour – which is imported into databases estimated to contain more than 2,5Pb of data; YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video every minute of the day; 90% of global data was generated in the last two years; the Obama administration is investing $200-million in big data research projects; and decoding the human genome, which originally took 10 years to process, can now be achieved in one week.
Evans says it is clear that instant unified data management is required to control, slice and dice this “vast inflow of diverse information in order to make business sense of it all – and to operate a company efficiently”.
“Unified data management, is the stuff my IT department has to do with our data so I can know my customers better. This will assist me to better serve their needs, thereby allowing my company to make more money and pay bigger bonuses,” explains Evans.
“Coming from a conventional ‘data management’ organisation, we’ve notice that you can no longer simply offer ‘data management’ per se to organisations. For one thing, it’s complicated to translate into tangible value, that is if we do data management what are we actually gaining?
“And two, the bigger picture / end-game is not clear to sponsors of our services by looking at our offering. So, we need to change how we package and present and address modern problems.”
There is an almost indescribable barrage of information in terms of velocity and volume – and it is increasing in tempo all the time. “It’s just increasing everywhere and accelerating exponentially.
The data by itself does not say much, but the bigger picture is putting the puzzle pieces of data together – not only in an organisation, but also from the Internet and all other sources to create a “universal profile” of the subject domain.
“So, in essence, how can modern organisations benefit from the massive volumes of data, internal and external, to their organisation related to their customers? They need to be able to do this to better understand how to serve, sell to them and adapt to the new generation and breed of customer -who is more influenced by his peers than marketing hype?
“To succeed and stay ahead of the pack – and just manage this massive amount of data – users need to analyse and grab onto every bit of info you can, else your competitors will, and they will use it against you as counter-intelligence.”
Big data
The “next big thing” out there, Evans continued, is called big data.
This is the next big challenge. Big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes exceedingly difficult to process using on-hand database management tools, or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis and visualisation.
The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data – as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to “spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine realtime roadway traffic conditions”.
Big data is just as it name tacitly implies – it is big data that, if controlled, can bring major efficiency benefits to businesses and organisations”.
The world’s technological per-capita capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s. As of 2012, every 2,5 quintillion bytes (2,5 × 1 018) bytes of data were created.
“The challenge for large enterprises is determining who should own big data initiatives that straddle entire organisations.”
Big data is difficult to work with using most relational database management systems. Instead desktop statistics and visualisation packages are required to probe “massively parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers”.
What is considered “big data” varies depending on the capabilities of the organisation managing the set, and on the capabilities of the applications that are traditionally used to process and analyze the data set in its domain.
“For some organisations, facing hundreds of gigabytes of data for the first time may trigger a need to reconsider data management options. For others, it may take tens or hundreds of terabytes before data size becomes a significant consideration.
“Given the snowball of data volumes and velocity, many companies may need to get back to basics, find the seemingly invisible pattern in their bulk of data – which unlocks the answers to questions of which you don’t even know what that question is that you need to ask.
“The emphasis should move from focusing on products for data management or disciplines. Rather, a user needs a one-stop solution – a packaged model that gives them insight instantly and abstracts all the technical data gibberish which organisations spend millions of dollars on cleaning up, putting data warehouses in place, and establishing governance practices.
“However the returns are now even more diminished than before.
“To avoid diminished returns the focus needs to go back to the ‘little guy’ – the small company with the limited budget who needs to survive in a strongly competitive world. In many instances, all he can rely on is intelligence – and if he spends his money to ‘gather this intelligence’ it HAS to bring tangible return minus all the ‘vendor noise’,” says Evans.
Speaking at the Summit, Evans said customer interaction bread-crumb trails spread over an organisation’s topology are hollow in their individual capacity, but the whole is more than the sum of the parts.
“But there are definite ways to unify a corporation’s data by simply utilising open industry standards and laying down governance to create a rapid road to maturity of one’s information assets – while at the same time eradicating the hype-cloud of technology to reveal the instant business value attainable by augmenting and capitalising of one’s existing technology investments.”
Commenting further, Evans said the global economy – and businesses – are faced with a “total overflow of information”.
Currently 2,7Zb of data exists in the digital world today: Walmart handles more than 1-million customer transactions every hour – which is imported into databases estimated to contain more than 2,5Pb of data; YouTube users upload 48 hours of new video every minute of the day; 90% of global data was generated in the last two years; the Obama administration is investing $200-million in big data research projects; and decoding the human genome, which originally took 10 years to process, can now be achieved in one week.
Evans says it is clear that instant unified data management is required to control, slice and dice this “vast inflow of diverse information in order to make business sense of it all – and to operate a company efficiently”.
“Unified data management, is the stuff my IT department has to do with our data so I can know my customers better. This will assist me to better serve their needs, thereby allowing my company to make more money and pay bigger bonuses,” explains Evans.
“Coming from a conventional ‘data management’ organisation, we’ve notice that you can no longer simply offer ‘data management’ per se to organisations. For one thing, it’s complicated to translate into tangible value, that is if we do data management what are we actually gaining?
“And two, the bigger picture / end-game is not clear to sponsors of our services by looking at our offering. So, we need to change how we package and present and address modern problems.”
There is an almost indescribable barrage of information in terms of velocity and volume – and it is increasing in tempo all the time. “It’s just increasing everywhere and accelerating exponentially.
The data by itself does not say much, but the bigger picture is putting the puzzle pieces of data together – not only in an organisation, but also from the Internet and all other sources to create a “universal profile” of the subject domain.
“So, in essence, how can modern organisations benefit from the massive volumes of data, internal and external, to their organisation related to their customers? They need to be able to do this to better understand how to serve, sell to them and adapt to the new generation and breed of customer -who is more influenced by his peers than marketing hype?
“To succeed and stay ahead of the pack – and just manage this massive amount of data – users need to analyse and grab onto every bit of info you can, else your competitors will, and they will use it against you as counter-intelligence.”
Big data
The “next big thing” out there, Evans continued, is called big data.
This is the next big challenge. Big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes exceedingly difficult to process using on-hand database management tools, or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis and visualisation.
The trend to larger data sets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data – as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to “spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine realtime roadway traffic conditions”.
Big data is just as it name tacitly implies – it is big data that, if controlled, can bring major efficiency benefits to businesses and organisations”.
The world’s technological per-capita capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s. As of 2012, every 2,5 quintillion bytes (2,5 × 1 018) bytes of data were created.
“The challenge for large enterprises is determining who should own big data initiatives that straddle entire organisations.”
Big data is difficult to work with using most relational database management systems. Instead desktop statistics and visualisation packages are required to probe “massively parallel software running on tens, hundreds, or even thousands of servers”.
What is considered “big data” varies depending on the capabilities of the organisation managing the set, and on the capabilities of the applications that are traditionally used to process and analyze the data set in its domain.
“For some organisations, facing hundreds of gigabytes of data for the first time may trigger a need to reconsider data management options. For others, it may take tens or hundreds of terabytes before data size becomes a significant consideration.
“Given the snowball of data volumes and velocity, many companies may need to get back to basics, find the seemingly invisible pattern in their bulk of data – which unlocks the answers to questions of which you don’t even know what that question is that you need to ask.
“The emphasis should move from focusing on products for data management or disciplines. Rather, a user needs a one-stop solution – a packaged model that gives them insight instantly and abstracts all the technical data gibberish which organisations spend millions of dollars on cleaning up, putting data warehouses in place, and establishing governance practices.
“However the returns are now even more diminished than before.
“To avoid diminished returns the focus needs to go back to the ‘little guy’ – the small company with the limited budget who needs to survive in a strongly competitive world. In many instances, all he can rely on is intelligence – and if he spends his money to ‘gather this intelligence’ it HAS to bring tangible return minus all the ‘vendor noise’,” says Evans.
