The use of data to generate business value is already a reality in many industries. However, despite the growing popularity of big data and the analytics it enables, we are still in the early stages of understanding its potential. In this post, we will discuss eight of the biggest challenges businesses face when working with big data.
- Finding the right data: Identifying the right data and determining how to best use it can be a major challenge. Building efficient teams to support analytics and thinking outside the box when developing revenue models can help companies overcome this challenge.
- Speed: To stay competitive, companies must analyze relevant data quickly. Installing hardware with increased memory and using grid computing are two possible solutions that allow businesses to explore large datasets in near-real-time.
- Understanding: Understanding and contextualizing the data is essential for businesses to analyze it effectively. Having the proper domain expertise and data governance processes in place can ensure that data is accurate and timely.
- Quality: The value of data for decision-making purposes will be compromised if it’s not accurate or timely. Data governance and information management processes can ensure that the data is clean, which is crucial for companies to gain necessary insights or perform required customer analysis.
- Display: Clustering data into higher-level views and grouping data together can help businesses gain greater visualization of their results. Displaying meaningful results can also be a challenge when dealing with large amounts of data.
- Technology: Investing in the right technology infrastructure is essential for big data success. Building a technology stack that can handle anticipated growth is key, as is understanding the potential value of outliers in the data.
- Outliers: Outliers may not be representative of the majority of data, but they can reveal previously unseen and potentially valuable insights. It’s important to remove outliers from the data and create a separate chart, or bin the results to both view the distribution of data and see the outliers.
- Culture: Some businesses have always relied on intuition and experience to make decisions, and may struggle to understand the importance of big data. However, embracing big data is essential for staying competitive in today’s business environment.
In conclusion, big data presents both opportunities and challenges for businesses. By understanding and overcoming these challenges, companies can leverage the potential of big data to achieve significant growth and stay competitive in their industries.
