English | EN Before You Jump into Big Data Lake!
Oct 20, 2014
Big Data Lake is generating the hype unseen since data warehouses were first introduced in the early nineties. With all the excitement, some organizations are really wondering if the magic wand to solve their data integration is finally here. High return on investments in business intelligence results from the actionable intelligence that can be weaved into strategic and day to day operations of an organization.
The following graph shows high return on investment for organizations that leverage analytics for their internal (tactical and strategic decision making) and external processes (i.e. supply chain analytic with partners).
This actionable intelligence really comes from predictive data models using data mining algorithms against data in traditional data warehouses or data marts. There are a few challenges with this scenario:
- The best and biggest data warehouses contain only a fraction of the data being generated in an organization.
- With the advent of new generation of connected devices, sensors, organizations are generating more data than ever. In most cases this data never makes it to the analytics environment
- Organizations create tremendous amount of unstructured data in the form text, audio and video from social media, documents, emails, smart phones etc. As per some industry estimates, unstructured data constitutes about 80% of total data being generated.
The implication of the three challenges mentioned above is that organizations have been using only a tiny fraction of the data they generate to create the actionable intelligence as a competitive advantage tool.
Big Data and associated advanced technologies can help organizations leverage the vast amounts of streaming and unstructured data along with structured data to get complete picture of the business so as to prevent product failure or reducing customer churn.
However most organizations are feeling overwhelmed when it comes to leveraging the Big data technology and platforms. With so many vendors popping up across the spectrum of Big data that they are feeling lost. Key challenges are:
- Where can they most effectively use and get high ROI?
- What technology or platform will work for them?
- How can the new platform align with their existing investments?
- Is Big Data really Schema less? Should they forget about 30 years of experience with relational data models?
In the next few blogs we’ll address each of these questions to help clear the air for organizations to leverage Big Data to gain insights they have never had before.
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