Demystifying the value of big data
- Summary:
- It's up to the business technology industry to go beyond buzzwords and show customers how big data can help achieve specific business goals
We can all agree the concept of big data comes from the desire to better manage and leverage massive amounts of data generated in the world each day. We can say it may help improve business decision-making. Yet after that established point, the answers may differ considerably. For many, the discussion is quickly overwhelmed by a blizzard of technology buzzwords (Hadoop, Pig, Hive and so on).
With vendors all hyping their respective segment of the space, it's hard to make sense of its value. Therein lies the challenge — and opportunity — for the business technology industry: how can we help customers use big data to drive their strategies and ultimately, their success?
It's important to give shape to the amorphous concept of big data and explain how it can help people in their everyday jobs as valuable, strategic contributors to the overall growth of their businesses. When talking to customers about big data, I try to avoid discussing the underlying technologies. Despite how excited those of us who work in the tech industry are about the many innovations powering the big data movement, the technology discussion can be confusing and intimidating to others.
Business goals
What our customers really want to know is how big data can help achieve specific business goals. They understand that there are a mass of public, third-party and internal data sources they can harness for evaluation and analysis alongside their existing transactional data. They want to know where they can apply that data to deliver 'quick win' results that yield real business value.
This is where big data templates can make a huge impact. Instead of simply focusing on data sources without considering the business context that makes them useful, ready-made templates can shortcut the hard work of making big data relevant to business outcomes.
Consider for example the human resources department. At large global companies, HR professionals develop compensation plans for dozens of countries across the globe, each of which is culturally and economically unique. Many pay for compensation benchmark data from a small number of reputable data providers (often called salary surveys), but that data is usually separated from the point of making a compensation decision.
There's a growing body of publicly available data such as unemployment rates, competitive job board postings and more that can further complement a compensation decision. To make it easier to understand the impact of this type of information, Workday has developed a Market Compensation Comparison template that brings in external benchmark survey data as well as publicly available information about specific job markets. This ready-made template aids in driving compensation decisions directly within a merit-cycle business process.
Applying templates
Other templates jump-start big data analytics in the finance sphere. For example, the Competitive Benchmark lets a business evaluate its overall performance against the competition by combining financials data such as operating margin, revenue, and return on invested capital (ROIC), with publicly available data sets from a competitor's financial statement filings.
Many of the templates developed by Workday have been a result of input from customers in the early release program for its Big Data Analytics offering. They range from High Performer Analysis, which analyses characteristics of employee histories to build profiles of what makes a likely high performer (very useful for recruiting), to Supplier Sentiment Analysis, which monitors publicly available social media data sets to create a sentiment scorecard for use in supplier risk management.
For business professionals, the keyword is 'application'. Data analysts will continue to be the ones tasked with helping their companies make sense of various forms of structured and unstructured data, but big data has to be applicable and usable by line-of-business executives and managers.
That's where the business technology industry can add real value, by putting the power of big data in the hands of people to make better decisions. This requires an easy — and even enjoyable — experience, using analytics tools that leverage big data on the mobile devices executives use and carry with them every day. Workday believes that simply 'porting' to mobile devices isn't enough; mobile should be the target platform for the application of big data.
Only by putting relevant analysis in front of people as they go about their daily tasks can big data become truly approachable, applicable, and most importantly, usable for customers.
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