20 must read Infograhics on Big Data
Big Data emphasizes the exponential growth of data volumes worldwide (collectively, >2.5 Exabytes/ day).
Big Data incorporate the following key tenets: diversification, low latency, and ubiquity. In parallel, the emerging field of data science introduces new terms including, predictive modeling, machine learning, parallelized and in-database algorithms, Map Reduce, and data monetization.
A variety of infographics have been published around Big Data, Data Scientists. Here is a compendium of some very interesting ones.
Big Data Big Opportunity
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A Data Scientist Study
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Apple IOS 6 Passbook: Enabling SoLoMoMe + Omni-channel Analytics
At the Analytics Executive Forum, I facilitated a session on Omni-channel analytics. It struck me how every leading consumer facing firm seems convinced that mobile is becoming the dominant B2C interaction channel. Mobile is the gateway to insight based marketing and the “always addressable customer”….
Insight-based interactions – The company knows who you are, what you prefer, and communicates with relevant, timely messages, using the power of analytical intelligence to detect patterns, decode strands of information and create meaningful offers and value.
The “always addressable customer.” This is a consumer who fits the bill on three fronts simultaneously: (1)
- Owns and personally uses at least three connected devices; (2)
Goes online multiple times throughout the day; (3)
- Goes online from at least three different physical locations
The opposite of insight-based is “spray-and-pray” marketing - The company has very limited knowledge about who you are, forgets what you prefer, and tries to reach you with off-target communications that alienate you – based on fragmented data, poor data quality and inadequate integration, resulting in confusing, chaotic interactions. A good example: “I have 2 million frequent flyer miles with your airline and still do not get any recognition, respect or value from this loyalty.”
As companies architect new insight based mobile use cases I suggest that they look at what is coming next. With IOS 6, Apple is delivering several new features. The most interesting is a new integrated time-saver feature called Passbook that I think will be a game changer in terms of user experience and value. Also Apple ditched Google Maps for their own in IOS 6 allows them to integrate user latitude/longitude coordinates combined with maps into a valuable location-aware platform for app development.
Retailers, banks and other customer facing firms/brands better pay attention. 100+ million iPhones are automatically getting this feature with the new OS upgrade making this a mega-disruptor in the coveted target segment everyone is chasing. Read more 
Omni-channel Conversion Optimization with Social Marketing/Media Analytics
Brooks Brothers is investing in tools & testing to improve the online experience – and ↑sales. In a test involving one product category page: men’s shirts. The retailer using Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews software, used customer reviews to sort items on the product page. Items with five ♥♥♥♥♥- the highest rating – appeared on the top of the page. The result: a 9% lift in conversions [Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium]
Are you ready to anticipate and influence your audience in a whole new way? Value migration from traditional marketing to 24×7 digital marketing is happening in leading firms. Real-time marketing and conversion is now becoming possible.
Machine Data Analytics: Splunk
Machine data or “data exhaust” analysis is one of the fastest growing segments of “big data”–generated by websites, applications, servers, networks, mobile devices and other sources. The goal is to aggregate, parse and visualize this data – log files, scripts, messages, alerts, changes, IT configurations, tickets, user profiles etc – to spot trends and act.
By monitoring and analyzing data from customer clickstreams, transactions, log files to network activity and call records–and more, there is new breed of startups that are racing to convert “invisible” machine data into useful performance insights. The label for this type of analytics – operational or application performance intelligence.
In this posting we cover a low profile big data company, Splunk which recently went public. Splunk has >3500 customers already. Splunk ended its first day on the stock market with amazing 108.7 percent bump in price from its $17-per-share IPO.
Next Best Offer Design: Solution Architecture
Next best offer, next best action, interaction optimization, and experience optimization typically have similar architecture. Machine learning and multivariate statistical analysis are at the heart of these cutting edge Behavioral Analytics strategies. Typically firms use statistical tools for segmentation models, behavioral propensity modeling, and market basket analysis.
The bleeding edge in next best offer is increasingly around:
- Applying machine learning to find connections between product tastes and different affinity statements
- Developing low-latency algorithms that help show the right product at the right time to a customer
- Developing rich customer affinity profiles through a variety of feedback loops as well as third-party data source (e.g. Facebook user demos and taste graph)
Targeted Offer Solutions
IBM CIO Study: BI and Analytics are #1 Priority for 2012/2013
“Running a company is an endless quest to find out things you don’t know“
– Jeff Immelt, CEO GE
What will 2012 bring? Recently, I attended the CIO Executive Leadership Summit in Greenwich, Connecticut. I was particularly intrigued by the presentation by the new CIO of IBM, Jeanette Horan where she presented the projects she was tackling and how IBM is thinking about business analytics.
IBM is making a bet that “true leaders” will develop the capabilities required for making good and timely decisions in unpredictable and stressful environments.
IBM is adapting to this new data analytics reality by a rapid-fire acquisition strategy: Cognos, Netezza, SPSS, ILog, CoreMetrics, Algorithmics, OpenPages, Clarity Systems, Emptoris, DemandTec (for retail). IBM also has other information management assets like Watson, DB2 etc. They are building a formidable capability around the value chain: “Raw Data -> Aggregate Data -> Intelligence ->Insight -> Decisions” . They see this as a $20Bln opportunity. Read more
Sentiment Analytics, Twitter, Federal Reserve and Consumer Pyschology
What do these have in common: The Federal Reserve Bank, Text Analytics, Facebook, Statistical Computations, Big Data and Keyword/Phrase/Boolean searching?
Interestingly these are more related than you think.
The Federal Reserve wants to develop a next generation Consumer Listening Platform based on social media sentiment analytics (or opinion mining) to know what people are saying and commenting about the economy.
The goal for the Fed is to better understand which way consumer confidence is trending. Microeconomics and psychology have always been interlinked. With social media, a real-time opportunity exists to monitor local, national and even global consumer psychology. And, coupled with analyzing e-commerce transactions, insightful linkage between consumer psychology and behavior (what they are spending money on and where) is possible. Read more
Big Data, Analytics and KPIs in E-commerce and Retail Industry
The change in consumer behavior and expectations that e-commerce, mobile and social media are causing is hugely significant – big data and predictive analytics will separate brand/retail winners from losers. This won’t happen overnight but the transformation is for real.
Retail Industry makes up a sizable part of the world economy (6-7%) and covers a large ecosystem - E-commerce, Apparel, Department Stores, Discount Drugstores, Discount Retailers, Electronics, Home Improvement, Specialty Grocery, Specialty Retailers and Consumer Product Goods suppliers.
Retail is increasingly is looking like a barbell – a brand oriented cluster at the high-end, a very thin middle, and a price sensitive cluster at the low end. The consumerization of technology is putting more downward pricing pressure in an already competitive “middle” retail environment. The squeeze is coming from e-commerce and new “point, scan and analyze” technologies that give shoppers decision making tools — powerful pricing, promotion and product information, often in real-time. Applications in iPhones and Droid, like Red Laser can scan barcodes and provide immediate price, product and cross-retailer comparisons. They can even point you to the nearest retailer who can give you free shipping (total cost of purchase optimization). This will lead to further margin erosion for retailers that compete based on price (a sizable chunk of the market in the U.S, Europe and Asia).
Data analytics is not new for retailers. Point of sale transactional data obtained from bar-codes first appeared in 1970s. A pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum was the first item scanned using Universal Product Code (UPC) in a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio in 1974. Since then, retailers have been applying analytics to get even smarter.
More recent use cases of retail analytics include: Read more
Are you one of these — Data Scientist, Analytics Guru, Math Geek or Quant Jock?
“The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians…” ‐ Hal Varian, Google
Analytics Challenge — California physicians group Heritage Provider Network Inc. is offering $3 million to any person or firm who develops the best model to predict how many days a patient is likely to spend in the hospital in a year’s time. Contestants will receive “anonymized” insurance-claims data to create their models. The goal is to reduce the number of hospital visits, by identifying patients who could benefit from services such as home nurse visits.
The need for analytics talent is growing everywhere. Analytics touches everyone in the modern world. It’s no longer on the sidelines in a support role, but instead is driving business performance and insights like never before.
Job posting analysis indicate that market demand for data scientists and analytics gurus capable of working with large real-time data sets or “big data” took a huge leap recently. The most common definition of “big data” is real-time insights drawn from large pools of data. These datasets tend to be so large that they become awkward to work with using on-hand relational database tools, or Excel.
It’s super trendy to be labeled “big data” right now – but that doesn’t mean the business trend’s not real. Take for the instance the following scenario in B2B supply chains. Coca-Cola Company is leveraging retailers’ POS data (e.g., Walmart) to build customer analytical snapshots, including mobile iPad reporting, and enable the CPFR (Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment) process in Supply Chain. Walmart alone accounts for $4 bln of Coca-Cola company sales.
Airlines, hotels, retail, financial services and e-commerce are industries that deal with big data. The trend is nothing new in financial services (low latency trading, complex event processing, straight thru processing) but radical in traditional industries. In trading, the value of insights depends on speed of analytics. Old data or slow analytics translate into losing money.
As data growth in business processes outpaces our ability to absorb, visualize or even process, new talent around Business Analytics will have to emerge. New roles such as Data Scientists, Analytics Savants, Quant Modelers are required in almost every corporation for converting the growing volumes of data into actionable insights.
Look at these data stats.
Apple iCloud Service – Lessons for “Big Data” and BI Architects
Apple with its iCloud offering is attacking the consumer facing digital content big data problem. Big Data is challenging on many fronts from the insights (e.g., analytics and query optimization), to the practical (e.g., horizontal scaling), to the mundane (e.g., backup and recovery).
On June 6th, 2011 Apple Inc. launched its new purpose built digital locker service called iCloud for its 225 million iTunes accounts that frees the end-user from the tyranny of the device. The iCloud service is a cloud offering that would allow users to store digital files such as photos, MP3 music, videos and documents in the cloud and access them from Internet-connected devices like iPhones, iPads, iPods, iMacs and others.
So, what’s the big deal? They are addressing a classic BI data management problem: How to free up data trapped in “device and application jails” in a user-friendly way. The “scan and match” concept is quite applicable to large scale Enterprise Datawarehouses which suffer from data integrity issues as edge data capture and consumption devices proliferate.
Data ingestion, governance and management is a huge problem facing large organizations. As data volumes double every year, not having a basic data management strategy will become an Achilles heel. Most organizations unfortunately don’t know what data assets they have, where these assets are, how they are organized and how well they are secured. Apple shows a neat way to address the Big Data problem in personal cloud management.
