Posts about Big Data

In the internet’s infancy, before search engines and browsers, you had to know exactly where to look to find the information you wanted.

With the emergence of search engines, the entire wealth of information became available at our fingertips just by inserting a keyword. Google’s most significant achievement involved making sense of big data served up from over a billion websites globally according to user preferences, location and history. Google simply and elegantly integrated the world wide web to deliver information with speed and relevance for the user.

 Mad Men - an American TV series about an advertising agency in the 60's
Image: http://bit.ly/1XsOYzq

Do you remember when marketing was associated with inventing original slogans and funny TV commercials? The image of the marketing team as the creative bunch in the company, attending hour-long brainstorm get-togethers while sipping Scotch, is long gone. Today it’s all about processes, analysis, and technology; choosing target markets through market analysis and segmentation and understanding methods of influence on the consumer behaviour¹. And it’s all being monitored closely to determine the Return on Marketing Investment². Nowadays the ‘Mad Men’ has more or less turned into ‘Math Men’.

Big Data. It is a term that has been around for years now, yet surprisingly most enterprise environments lack a cohesive Master Data Management (MDM) strategy to tackle the challenges Big Data creates.

Big Data means different things to different people, but the brass ring of Big Data is always the same: get the right information to the right people at the right time. No matter how much data there is, or how fast it needs to move, the aim is to deliver timely information that trained eyes and minds can convert into insight. Big Data initiatives should equip decision makers with a robust view that accurately reflects the state of the business and provides a strong foundation for analysis. 

Master data management (MDM) and Big Data are both fashionable topics at present in the world of enterprise software, but how do they relate to one another? Large global organizations struggle to get a single, consistent view of their master data such as customer or product even in the world of conventional data. Big Data refers to volumes of data that relational databases struggle to handle, at least in an economic manner. Such data may be machine generated, such as sensor data, or may be customer related, such as the traffic from web sites or social media. In either case it can be seen that it would be desirable to link such data up to a company’s products and customers rather than dealing with it in isolation. For example, identifying an issue with your customer web traffic is one thing, but you really want to be able to track the issue back to the right customer account or accounts, which is where master data comes in.