 "Prabhu Kannan")
Big Data - dubbed 'the new oil' by the World Economic Forum - has become a key focus area for corporate leaders today. A recent international survey of finance professionals, including those working at the CEO and the CFO level, conducted by Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and American Institute of CPAs reveals that 86 per cent of organisations are struggling to turn growing volumes of data into valuable insight and are suffering as a result. Can Big Data really change the way business is done? Or are companies getting caught in a hype?
Director, Commerce & Innovation, SapientNitro
Marketers are well-versed with the techniques of targeting and personalisation that they have employed for decades. Personalisation strives to serve relevance while acknowledging intimacy but the question that is topmost in the marketer's mind is, "Can I predict or even shape desire in my target consumer?".
A combination of new technology and consumer changes are making this possible. Our world today is instrumented. We can collect huge amounts of data - volunteered, observed and inferred. Marketers have enough signals as to how consumers engage with experiences in the past, what consumers and people they trust like, what interests consumers, what consumers need and their context. Our belief is, just collecting huge amounts of data does not have value in isolation. But if this data (big or any data for that matter) is used to provide a superior experience, improve emotional engagement, and ultimately show up in conversion, it is a win for the business.
We recently worked with a North American automobile manufacturer to do a proof-of-concept to show how voluminous weblog data can be used to predict consumer behaviour. Built on top of a solid business intelligence platform, we extracted relevant information, created business rules to analyse the data, categorised on behaviour segments and performed predictive analytics to determine potential consumer behaviour and the preliminary results are very encouraging.
Ironically, the huge potential of data is actually holding marketers back. The opportunity is so big and so fundamental that they want to get it right, but legacy systems and internal politics make that almost impossible. Every year, we hear from clients that data is put in the "important" but "too hard" box. This is a mistake. To overcome this, we use a fairly simple framework - switch from analysis to action, think flexibly, and think about the way you think, centralise intelligence and be agile. Iterate, test and iterate again.
The simplest way to think about data is as feedback from consumers. Be smart and act on that feedback. In today's instrumented world, the feedback is near real-time. Instead of producing reports, run experiments. For one of our leading clients in Europe, we listened to the feedback and a simple change of re-surfacing an abandoned shopping cart resulted in significant uptick to revenue.
What do we mean by think flexibly and think about the way you think? Balance different perspectives and continually reflect on any biases in the way you think. It is important to be inclusive and seek diversity of skill-sets in identifying and exploiting Big Data opportunities. The sub-disciplines of marketing strategy, creative, technology and analytics have typically resided in organisational silos. Marketers may have a leaning towards big ideas, or creative excellence and technology or analytics may be viewed as commodity enablers. Implicit or explicit favour of some disciplines over others impedes collaboration. Connected thinking is looking around corners, across silos, and asking how techniques and tools from one discipline can be applied and multiplied by those in another discipline.
Digital businesses like Amazon have shown that customer knowledge is foundational to shaping personalised experiences that help each customer achieve his or her goals while promoting the firm's commerce goals. They centralise the stewardship of customer knowledge. The technology to do this exists today. We have implemented a managed brand platform for a global, multi-brand consumer products firm with dozens of brands. Different brands and their agencies create digital campaigns - microsites, social, sweepstakes and mobile - and deploy these to the managed platform. The customer database is centralised and captures all data, behavioural and transactional, and associates it with unique visitors.
The correlation with broadcast media activity and search metrics are also integrated into this database. The insight enables targeted content and customisation across brands. Content processes, shared brand assets, security and scale are managed centrally, delivering reliability and trimming costs. The platform is more than technology - a customer-centric insights team and account managers who work with the brands, their agencies and the development team to maximise platform value, support it.
Last but not the least, don't go for the big ideas. Success through accumulation of marginal gains is an acceptable and more likely, feasible strategy when it comes to deriving value out of data that you have.
VP & managing partner, Global Business Services, IBM India & S Asia
Think about it… Each day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated by a variety of sources - from climate information, to posts on social media sites, and from purchase transaction records to healthcare medical images. Over 2.7 billion people interconnected via mobile devices, one trillion devices connected to the internet of things, and that 90 per cent of all the world's information was generated in just the past two years. And within all of these lay the world's newest and increasingly valuable natural resource, one both infinite and ever-growing: information.
We believe that Big Data and analytics are catalysts to help businesses and society become more competitive and drive growth, if only it is harnessed rightly to uncover valuable insights and make smarter decisions. While Big Data equals a big payoff, the key challenge to analytics capitalisation stems from people, not technology. Our latest research indicates that while a majority of the highest performing organisations cite growth or innovation as the chief value of business analytics, some form of political or executive resistance is the primary barrier to realising the full value of their investments.
Indeed, the key challenges to advance Big Data and business analytics within organisations comprise sponsorship, trust and skills, and gaps in these areas. It is all about increasing executive advocacy, strengthening trust across the organisation, and building deeper knowledge and skills. For sure, unlocking the value of Big Data takes the right alignment of strategy, standards, technology and organisational structure.
Significantly, trust plays a key role as organisational silos and a fragmented approach can cause a breakdown of trust among different groups of people who may be accessing, interpreting, and using data in different ways.
But to take advantage of all this information and maximise the value of the firm, technology would have to evolve into a new era, what we call a cognitive computing. Juxtaposed against the backdrop of the first epochs of computing - first, systems of tabulation, next, systems of programming - the era of cognitive computing seems exponential in terms of capability because in the systems of cognition, computers would have to learn.
Why? Because, with that much data being generated, we will never be able to programme all those systems. One, in this new world, the smarter enterprise would be driven by information and analytics. All of us will be required to make more decisions more quickly in a more complex environment, and those that choose to be smarter enterprises will have a competitive advantage, but only if they choose to put analytics at the centre of their efforts.
Two, everything the smarter enterprise creates will bring new value by infusing intelligence into its operations. We can see the signals already like smart meters for cars and electric grids, embedded software in cars and pay-as-you-go insurance. Manufacturers are moving towards a 'production line of one' but intrinsic to that is the ability to create value both in what they make, and how they make it.
Third, it is all about personalisation and immediacy. It is imperative for businesses today to deliver value not to customer segments but to individuals. They need to know more about clients as individuals and more often, so as to put that knowledge to productive and beneficial use to their clients. It is going to revolutionise the science of management. The engaged employee will drive the client's experience, and this in turn will drive business results.
This would mean a new kind of leadership. Information will be the new natural resource for the 21st century. It will mean what steam meant to the 19th century, and carbon mean to the 20th century. It will force economic growth and societal progress.
Yet, the enterprise's role in our lifetime will be less about doing work efficiently and more about creating value authentically and transparently. Building the smarter enterprise will be the leadership challenge of the next generation.
It is time to seize the opportunity and tap the next natural resource - Big Data. And the time to act is now so as to transform the business, society and the planet.
