How Business Benefits from Big Data
Updated: Feb 13, 2020
How Business Benefits from Big Data
The different types of big data in current use and its evolution
For sake of discussion and simplicity, let’s group Big Data into 2 groups. A business’s internal Big Data, such as retail transactional data or in app usage data, and external Big Data such Telco.
With internal data, you get a full view of how your customer is interacting with you. With external data, you get a view of the market, not necessarily your customers, but all the accessible market.
Businesses now have access to unprecedented amount of data from multiple sources. Within Telco alone, we are looking at over 7,000 Terabytes of data traffic per day. With many businesses adopting Big Data Analytics practice, the hunger for data only grows.
Benefits of Big Data at various levels – from individuals to corporations to the economy
Big Data is fire. It is powerful, difficult to harness, and can be both productive and destructive. Applied correctly, it can power new development. Abuse it, and it will burn down companies.
If all corporations harness the power of analytics, and with the consumer being well aware of what data is being shared and how it is being used in their best interest, enormous benefits can be reaped by both the consumers, the company, and the economy.
If you choose to share your consumer needs and preferences, the right offers could be delivered to your fingertips as soon as you realized you have needs, saving lots of time for both you, the selling company, and allow the economy to run more efficiently.
Big Data, applied correctly and responsibly, can be an economic boon. It can benefit everyone from individual level to an entire economy.
Drawing the line between Big Data & Big Brother
The key words here are “applied correctly and responsibly”. That is the fine line that divides a benevolent Big Data society and a Big Brother society.
Consumers are more liberal at generating data points than most are aware of. Consumers should be made aware of what data they are generating and allowed to take ownership of their data, what to share and for what purposes. For example, if you share your data, you are entitled to highly personalized offers. If you do not, then your offers cannot be personalized. This is fair trade: you offer your data in exchange for better deals.
Corporations then are responsible for the well-being of the consumers who generated those data points. Fair and transparent incentives should be offered to collect and utilize those data. Data collection should never be forced. No consumer should be denied services when they choose not to share.
Big Data Analytics at that level, should be opt-in, not pre-enrolled nor forced, and always with the flexibility to opt-in and back in whenever. Both sides of the data equation have to take the “correct and appropriate” course of actions, and then, perhaps then, the fire of Big Data will burn brightly and light a path towards a better future for all of us.