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Big Data: From the Ground Up
To remain competitive in today’s technology-driven economy, companies have become more and more dependent on data. Whether a company uses data in decision-making is no longer the question. The popular buzzword “Big Data” echoed in both executive and operational corridors. Of course, many questions are raised about this term. To understand what Big Data is, one must strip off all the hype that makes it an enigma in the big digital world.
What is Big Data?
Big Data is a term that simply means an aggregate of all pieces of data that an organization has stored since its inception. There is a common misconception about Big Data – that it’s complex data collected somewhere, probably in a cloud and only savvy data scientists can access and manipulate it.
Big Data includes everyday sales data in a retail store, whether structured or unstructured. It might be on hardcopy invoices or stored in a digital form. Think of all the bookmarked URLs in each employee’s computer and data continually generated by the Internet of Things (IoT), websites, social media platforms, and other sources. That too is part of Big Data that can be used in different types of analysis to influence certain decisions.
Big Data at the bottom levels of an organization
Most employees at the operation level of an organization thing that Big Data is “a thing of the executives”. They don’t realize that they are the ones who create and interact with Big Data on a daily basis. Workers in low management levels ought to realize that every figure or statement they use and store in the company’s database forms part of the company’s Big Data. They, therefore, have a responsibility of ensuring data accuracy at the operational level.
Challenge to executives
Big Data has become the new reality of the corporate world. Management must know that the decisions it makes concerning data affect the reputation and ultimate valuation of the company. Companies are committing large amounts of resources on Big Data analytics. The use, misuse, and governance of data have a direct impact on the goodwill of the company.
