Why big data is so important for businesses?

Why big data is so important for businesses?

• The importance of big data is growing in larger companies to arrange various data in scientific and systematic way
• According to Business Insider, 56% of respondents cited enhanced productivity with the use of big data
• Big data tools are very important in the field of marketing and to make the business projects more cost viable
• The technology has some drawbacks as well that restricts businesses to achieve their full potential level

The large sets of structured and unstructured data (big-data), are complex where regular data processing techniques do not work in dealing with these types of data sets. 3V models (i.e. volume, velocity and variety) are generally used to describe big data. Businesses collect data from many sources such as: sales, social Medias, customer survey or employee number and their payrolls. Storing such types of data are big problems for larger companies. Therefore, big data have become needs for many multi-national companies.

Benefits of big data for businesses

Understand the market conditions

Big data analysis helps to understand current market conditions and trends. For example: by analyzing customers’ purchasing behavior, a business can find out the products that are sold the most and design their products in the future accordingly. As a result, it can gain higher market share by beating its competitors.

Understand customers better

Businesses can predict what its customers want in advance and provide them a better service in addition to better products. According to Forbes, the pace of investment in big data is increasing, and in 2019 it reached to 91.6%. Businesses can not only minimize customer complaints by using big data tools but also can increase their business agility.

Control online reputation

Sentiment analysis of big data can detect helps to get more feedback about who is saying what about companies. This helps to improve and monitor online presence of businesses. As per Forbes, it has been identified that there is 87.8% of greater urgency to invest in big data in the year 2019.

Cost savings

Implementing big data tools may be expensive in the beginning but it will eventually save a lot of money. Big data tools reduce the burden of IT staff, since they are real time systems. Storing large amount of data is much easier using big data technologies. Moreover, the stored data will be accurate because big data tools have greatly reduced the risk of inaccurate data.

The table below shows the investment of businesses in (dollars) in the years 2018 and 2019:

What are the challenges?

However, there are various challenges associated with the use of big data that may not   be solved overnight. Some of them include:

• Big data looks like a hairball in its raw form and scientific approach to the data is necessary
• They store all the captured data separately in different units which may increase data silos decreasing the ability for integration
• Data silos also increase the data inaccuracy. According to recent report from Experian Data Quality, 75% of businesses believe their consumer contact information is incorrect
• Traditional businesses are slower to move on to technological advances and are facing serious competition.
• Data analysts have to be champion in understanding data from scientific as well as business perspective and they are rarely found. According to Cap Gemini’s report, 37% of companies have trouble finding skilled data analysts.