By Hannah Evans
Big Data Week London 2015: a festival of social data around the globe. Fantastically organised and executed by all, the event brings together 400 speakers in 40 different global cities to provide a series of workshops, training, user groups and conference to business and technical audiences in this unique week-long celebration. This year, the main conference in London was split into two ‘tracks'; a business and tech track. Recurring themes were threaded through many of the presentations; here are my reflections from the business track. Look our for part 2 for reflections from the tech track too.
1. Data = THE BIGGER THE BETTER
“Big” data is all the rage. But what if you don’t have enough of it? John Abbey from customer science giant Dunnhumby explored the different methods of increasing the datasets of your organisation. You can either collect it yourself, partner with another organisation or acquire another company entirely. However each method has associated benefits and challenges. If you collect it yourself, you own the whole relationship with the data and customer and have the power to evolve the data in the future, however this takes time, investment and skilled resources to do successfully. Alternatively, you can engage a data partner – this is a fast way of accessing unavailable data, however can dilute margins and cause inefficiencies along the way. Or why not acquire another company? This is quick and can give increased competitive advantage, however is also high risk, high cost and poses integration challenges.
2. Innovation = FAIL FAST, SUCCEED FASTER
Once decided you could benefit from more data, you need to find innovative technologies to collect it. Jim Anning from British Gas highlighted that big data is all about the technology decisions you use to handle your datasets; and these technology decisions need to …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com