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Sid Deshpande, Senior Analyst, Gartner says that big data analytics holds significant potential for organisations to leverage new and existing data types for competitive advantage. However, due to some key evolutionary issues, enterprises are still evaluating it.
Can you elaborate on the impact of big data on IT heads?
Big data impacts IT heads if they start realising that the starting point of any big data project is people and processes and not so much technologies. A critical success factor for big data analytics projects is bringing IT and business closer, or in the case of service providers, bringing them closer to their customers behaviour. Instead of going after the low hanging fruits of a few technologies, IT heads need to harness the big data advantage by hiring qualified data scientists and professionals. Secondly, they need to evaluate the business case and specific outcomes of the proposed big data project, before thinking of re-architecting internal IT from a people/ processes/data management standpoint, to avoid investing in tactical projects.
Should big data be considered a challenge or an opportunity?
New forms of big data are emerging and there are parallel evolutions of technologies, giving rise to an ecosystem of software and hardware products that are enabling users to analyse this data to produce new and granular levels of insight. Since it is early, it is considered as a challenge as there is no appropriate structure worked out to identify big data. It should be clear that big data is neither a technology in itself nor is it a distinct and uniquely measured market of products or vendor revenue. There are no proven cases either. The opportunity could be identified in the selection of hardware and software tools for a big data project depending upon the use, case or project outcome, data type, bandwidth consideration, integration with in-house infrastructure, compatibility with in-house virtualised infrastructure and project cost.
How can an IT manager harness big data benefits to make it relevant to his organisational needs?
Some of the large enterprises and communications service providers are exposed to large big data analytics opportunities because the nature of their data requirements closely fits all the parameters that define big data projects. The primary task of the IT managers is to analyse their data based on velocity, volume, variety and complexity. The explosion of information, in both volume and complexity, has brought about a need to drive actionable insights. IT managers can leverage analytics and intelligence tools to perform efficient analysis of unstructured data growth from mobile networks, social media and collaboration platforms, which will help them have a competitive edge.
How should they prepare themselves to handle the big data?
Firstly, IT heads and managers need to invest their energies in profiling the data to understand and classify it. Secondly, they need to find out the various multiple data generation points and evaluate them with information management tools. Understand the business needs and what the groups expect or do with the data and how it is helpful to them. Evaluation of in-house skills that can and evaluating data is critical. Work out a possible structure of integrating the ideas with top-level management in terms of data generation. It is important to work out an effective cost structure required in the data analytics process and communicate it to the business heads. The reason is that there is no standard theory available on RoI for big data projects yet. Most of the early adopters of big data technologies use the Apache Hadoop framework today.
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