Today almost every company is experiencing unprecedented data growth. They have one of three options. The first is to live with longer and longer running queries. 100 seconds today, 500 seconds in six month and 900 seconds in a year. The second option is to start trimming data and look at smaller and smaller data sets. The third is to look at big data options. Companies harnessing this big data challenge in meaningful ways are changing the very competitive landscape they operate in. Here are some ways that companies are leveraging big data and changing their playing fields. Just look at the digital world of entertainment. It contains images, audio, movies, TV Shows and all this constitutes a lot of data. It does not belong to the enterprise but has a lot of data. It is possibly the largest data consumer on the planet today. Some examples are:-
1. Music Industries need
to churn a lot of data in order to be able to predict the next Madonna or Lady
Gaga, with their experience they have all the signatures that can predict a
great musician way ahead of competition. Proactive companies are looking at
their license and contracts in real-time due to the emergence of private labels
and their competitive push in the music industry. The other area of impact is
the digital music distribution
2. Utilities depend on
energy production and consumption. Unfortunately there is no efficient method
to store excess energy. So utilities loose if they produce more and lose more
if they produce less. Energy consumption, Smart meters and making our planet a
little green is a quest that is realizable but the amount of data is humongous.
While each utility does their job the central governments or environment
agencies can collate all the data from various utilities and conduct
consolidated national environmental analysis for a greener nation.
3. Tourist economies
like Hawaii and Singapore cannot afford the spread of any disease and thus are
looking at ways to monitor targeted drug sales in real time across their
tourism economy. Haiti actually managed
to track cholera from their twitter streams. In order to accomplish this they
need to sort over 250 million records on a daily basis, but the effort is worth
the prevention. Harvard Medical School already has a study that analyzes tweets
for infectious disease signals.
4. The world
of self-publishing is getting more and more digital and the diamonds are in
blogs and self-publishing contents. Getting information from the blogosphere does
not require tons of equipment of thousands of servers. All it needs is a few
very smart people. While publishers are very content sensitive there are ways
to search by tagging, and big data scientists accomplish all this with smart algorithms
and search programs. Almost on a weekly
basis companies are reporting success of searching the blogosphere, while
global security folks are catching terrorists and criminals across the planet.
5. Healthcare and hospitals are under tremendous pressure to cut costs and prevent hospital errors,
while optimizing their information systems and patient care. Up until recently
most hospitals were driven by EMR, or electronic medical records- systems that
converted paper into digital images. However, these customers realized that
paper was scalable but not information relevant. A larger problem is that ERM captures
only part of the patient care information. The modern goal is to create one big
database that encompasses the hospitals, doctors, equipment, medication, patients,
medication, etc. Firstly hospitals
have to deal with images like CAT, PET, X-Rays, etc. Secondly they have to encompass structured data currently residing
in relational databases like accounts payable, charges, patient medication etc.
The third category is the
unstructured data, which can be as large as 80% of the data includes post-operative
data, contra indicative data, radiology reports, external reports, audio reports,
etc. Proactive companies, like UPMC, are
now providing services to hospitals and Healthcare Corporations. Hospitals
themselves have started taking small steps into harmonized data and mobile
analytics whereby a nurse can have full access to a patients medication as she walks
into a room along with where the nearest equipment is in case of an emergency. “When
we look at healthcare we cannot place our data into silos” said one hospital
dean, “the advantage of having it all accessible, from X-rays to medication for
each patient in real-time is going to be priceless. It will revolutionize the
medical industry”.
6. For Telecom
companies their goldmine is in the digital records they store. The
cellphone bill tells person related contextual information. Each text sent by a
cell phone may contain a wealth of information for disease control, homeland
security, public healthcare, crime prevention, welfare potentials and a host of
other information that is invaluable to government and corporations worldwide.
Mining cellphone data can solve a lot of the world’s social problems and can
also empower governments on development tasks. It can lead to social dynamics
and even assist in catching terrorists as it was done in the 9/11 bombing. It
is an excellent source for collating how people move around and how people
think as particles and within a collective ecosystem. When particles oscillate within
a group known to have specific properties then their participation or result
may become predictable. For example if a tourist oscillates within a infectious
group or locality their possibility of contacting the disease becomes
predictable.
7. All this comes to Mobile Analytics and Data Visualization. The iPad has changed the
face of personal computing and along with it brought finger-tip analytics for
people on the go. iPad is a clear example of a disruptive technology, with its
multi-touch capabilities, always connected capabilities and a host of mobile
analytical tools that now make getting the right information at your fingertips
a reality. Companies like Roambi and SAP’s Mobi allow enterprises to easily
create visual reports and analytics and take them to new boundaries of
informatics. A visual analytic can now be swiped, flipped, pulled down and across,
and with a tap of the finger take the user to the underlying data that rolls up
into the visualization. User expectations are getting very high and the iPad
has capabilities to meet them all, and in most cases exceed them. It is not
uncommon to see executives carrying iPads. They do not use them for movies or
games but carry their whole enterprise in real-time mode with them all the
time. Executive decisions taken on the golf-course or while on a holiday are becoming
more and more routine. Hospital staff having a transparent view of all their
patients and all their support equipment routine. Executives and managers are
viewing their subordinates in realtime, while musicians can see their license
and revenues in real-time too. Behind all this real-time analytics is a host of
technologies that can parse big data in exceptional speeds.
Come and enjoy the world where the size of data is no longer a limitation. Where your business needs to find their vision where big data can be harnessed in true real-real time, and where data visualization tools enable them to access this information anywhere, anytime and when they need it. Ten years ago this represented the Promised Land. Today we have the stairway to reach it.
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