Seeing through the complexity of Big Data

What’s “trending” in the field of business currently? According to McKinsey Global Institute, Big Data represents the new frontier for innovation, competition and productivity. According to a definition from the magazine Forbes, Big Data is a collection of data from traditional and digital sources internal and external to the enterprise that represents a source for ongoing discovery and analysis.

The term Big Data has become a big trend due to the accelerated volume, speed and variety of unstructured consumer information caused by the emergence of digital technology. According to the consulting firm Booz & Company, one way of visualizing Big Data is to imagine a quadrant, with on the horizontal axis, two segments representing “internal” and “external” data, and on the vertical axis, two segments representing “structured” and “unstructured” data respectively. Internal structured data such as Operations or Financial data is the category best understood by enterprises, yet still most often poorly exploited. Unstructured external data (continuously expanding with social media such as Facebook, Twitter & blogs) represents the largest area of opportunity for enterprises to gather consumer insights. Global firms like Google, Amazon and Tesco have eclipsed competitors with powerful new business models based on their ability to exploit data. According to a research from MIT, companies that inject Big Data and analytics into their operations show productivity rates and profitability that are 5% to 6% higher than those of their peers. A global leading hotel group with 4,500 hotels in nearly 100 countries leverages on Big Data predictive analytics in order to plan investments and offers based on insights about guests’ staying and purchasing behaviours, and to develop mobile booking apps.

The necessary conditions need to be in place however, otherwise most organisations would probably miss the Big Data wave in much the same manner as they struggled with other concepts or the “CRM” (Customer Relationship Management) or the BI (Business Intelligence) waves in spite of huge investments. In order to benefit from Big Data, first, integrated thinking is required – the ability to identify, combine and manage multiple sources of data. Second, the appropriate technology is required – the capability for advanced analytics models for predicting and optimizing outcomes. Third, and most critical, analytical skills and aptitudes are needed – managers must possess data analysis (e.g statistical) skills to convert data into business insights for better decision making. The pre-requisite condition for such decision making is a data-driven mindset which allows data to speak to people, inspire fresh ways for identifying, framing and solving problems. This is not restricted to Big Data problems but to most management problems.

One of the best practices being adopted by leading organisations is the application of the analy-tical skills of “data-scientists” – which would be a new job description for most Mauritian enterprises.  A first step towards a data-driven mindset would be to learn “trending” – determining the trends and the causes as a key management skill. Trending is seeing! Trends analysis can be performed in the form of run-charts to solve many management problems as taught by Edwards Deming in his book Out of Crisis. Effective visualization of data to allow stakeholders consume information is needed for a data-driven mindset. For example, after filtering through arrays of tables over several annual reports to obtain the basic operational ratios of a leading hotel group, trends analysis of these ratios tells us a story eloquently: investments since 2009 led to an increase in the room capacity at year end 2013 by about one-third while the number of nights sold per room fell by 25% from the 2007 level. A data-driven mindset, analytical techniques and visualization tools are key to seeing through the complexity of most common management problems to start with and then through Big Data.