Big Data Cases and Scenarios

Thanks to a set of technological advances in areas like internet, sensors, microprocessors and mobile communications, things are interconnected sources of vast amounts of data. Big data is getting bigger at an exponential rate, and traditional data technologies are not designed for this scenario. But with the right people and proper use of big data technology you can now take advantage, solve, predict and prevent almost any problem that arises on a quick and accurate manner. We can now dominate the target market through a personalized experience. We can now automatically visualize data to create meaningful solutions. We can now gain a better understanding on everything about life and our existence, about our past, the present and future and give more detailed answers and solutions through big data. Every big enterprise now understands the power of Big Data. It predicts that data is the new currency of tomorrow, some call it the black gold of today and the next source of economic growth that every one of us needs to contribute to and share.

Big Data is powerful, and it creates big impact to organization and opportunities to people who understand it. It's not about theory, hype or a buzzword anymore. Big Data is everywhere! it can dominate your industry if you apply it in the right way and with the right team who understand the technicality and can create the algorithm and models that can automatically bridge problems with solutions. Big Data will continue to have an impact on any businesses, organization or government agency in the years to come.

As you know, everything that is digital is data and Big Data by definition is a massive amount of information that traditional IT's, technologies and businesses can't handle. It's vast amounts of data that require technical computational methods to understand. When specialists analyze it effectively, large and diverse data sets can reveal unique patterns and relationships across thousands of data variables. Big Data is like goldmine, it is there but it is massive and hidden beneath the surface, you need the right tools and procedures to attain it. While in Big Data, it is all there, it is huge, and it is everywhere. The information is continuously flowing and is unstoppable. We have all the data from Machine Sensors (Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Digital Twin and the like...) and Human Digital Inputs (Records, Posts, Tweets, Likes, Shares, Sentiments and the like...) Now there is unprecedented total of a zeta bytes of data in the world and 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data are generated everyday. Imagine that number of bytes and the number of opportunities. 85% of the enterprises now use cloud based services. This is only the beginning and in the following decades everything will be about data and connectivity.

Big Data is already around us, and most people aren't aware of how it impacts their daily lives. For you to understand and feel that big data is already around you, try to visualize your daily routine, interests and habits. All the data and information that you've shared online is vulnerable. They know where you are, scary but it's true if you rely on software providers, OS, ISP and downloaded Apps.

You know what the weather today is, right? You even know what the weather is for this week, from the phone you are using to the car that you're driving, they will follow you and notify you. Your posts, likes, comments and shares online is important to them, even without doing anything as long as you're online they will know your sentiments and interests. Watch a movie on Netflix and they will suggest what they think you'd want to watch next based on their big data algorithm model. You go to buy something on Amazon but then you see the recommendations and end up buying more than what you went there for, it's all based on a recommendation engine model inside the big data algorithm. Go to the bank and transact, to malls, retail stores, shop and swipe your cards, then be ready for the incoming proposals and offerings in your mail or in your inbox without your consent or authority. Sounds scary, but it's the reality we live in. We are living in a digital world, every action you make digitally leaves digital footprints. It's all about using data to improve client experience and develop the capability to interact with clients in a way that anticipates our needs as the main goals, in-short it's all about business. Let's all hope that they will use the power of big data to make our lives more meaningful, enjoyable and exciting rather than compromising our privacy and security for the sake of business interest.

Let's get more serious, Big Data has become too complex and dynamic to be able to process, store, analyze, secure and manage with traditional data tools. Data privacy, security and vulnerability are some of the main concerns on applying big data. Fortunately, with the existing hardware, tools, big data algorithms, models, and the right team, you can now unleash and dig-in with the real goldmine of data opportunity - the knowledge.

Big Data is the key to real opportunities! Data is the source of tremendous goods that create possibilities.

If you want to adopt big data to your organization, you need to concentrate on the business objectives - not on the technology, you should first understand the type of goals, problems and scenarios you've encountered, followed by the type of outcome, actions and solutions that you want to implement. The organization needs to focus on business innovation with big data as their front-line. It is more about visualizing the goals, current situations, finding patterns with your structured data, and predicting the outcome rather than guessing and being ignorant to the reality and data right in front of you. This is not just about data anymore you are now applying big data that can change the business for bigger opportunities. If you do not adapt and implement it, others would do it and dominate your industry. Instead of sitting there and guessing why your competitors are growing and you are not, think of changing your corporate formula, start your big data initiative now and see the difference, connect with the right people and use the latest big data technology available and you will not regret it.

Below are the 5 sample cases and benefits of Big Data for some fields and industry. Let us assume you have already setup all the hardware, technology and big data tools, and found your right team or big data service provider. The case scenarios below is just an overview and a very small part of big opportunity, for you to maximize the potential of big data, you need to develop the best team and focus group to entirely dominate your target market.

1. Banking: Typical Banking sources of Big Data came from Customer Bank Visits, Call Logs, Web Interactions, Credit Cards Histories, Transaction Types, Banking Volumes and Social Media. Using Big Data to Banking can limit the Customer Risk Assessment, Anti-Money Laundering Procedures and Fraud Detection, Compliance and Regulatory reporting can be well implemented, Customer Relationship can manage it well and the Stock Trade Surveillance and Pattern can analyze on real-time.

Case Scenario: Understanding Customer Activity is the first priority in banking. By Applying Big Data to analyze the customer transaction and financial activities you can now see big picture and personalize which products and services you need to offer and improve. You can also detect and record fraud on real-time and prevent it to happen. You can immediately advice authority to stop the attempt and warn the concern clients on the activity by which it is their privilege to trust your bank and secure their assets. With those huge amount of data generated everyday by your clients and bank operation you can maximize the potential of quality banking experience.

2. Government: Data from regulations, laws, patents, legislations, massive submitted reports and the like, it's very hard to define which is right and which is not. Finding patterns from previous data and take action faster and create solutions for the benefits of people who rely on government services is a big questions. With the transaction from the public service from government agencies, it creates and stores massive amount of data everyday. Every departments, every government agencies have a different types of projects, products and services offered. With the implementation of a big data-driven government and data transparency they can visualize the entire operation on real-time basis. They can improve public service and offer a good governance.

Case Scenario: Public Service is one of the major role of any government. One of the many questions of trust in the government is the corruption inside agencies. Billions or maybe trillions of dollars are lost worldwide in the government due to the greediness and personal interest of some government officials and employees as well. And the one who suffered most are the people who wait for the government's support and projects to make our life more meaningful.

By using big data, government transactions, projects and implementations can now be easily understand and visualize on real-time. Imagine implementing a project and you know exactly what happen with every cents, every provider involves. You can monitor and track on real-time every details on it from the procurement to bidders to implementation; status, cause of delays and any related information about the projects. With big data you have eye on everything around your department.

3. Manufacturing: Manufacturing database is massive from supply chain to distribution chain. Big Data Strategy become a big tool to monitor real-time, quickly, faster and become efficient and take immediate action to respond to demands and needs. From RFID, bar code scanner, GPS, ERP, manufacturing line sensors, transportation system, weather data, energy usage, vendor data, customer data and so on.. Data is flooding and data needs to be refined and to get the real value.

Case Scenario: Using big data in manufacturing is challenging but it's very worth it. Imagine you add sensors on production facilities and machinery, you collect different precision data from production lines and you can monitor every inch and every corner of your plant in real-time with the high definition cameras you can collect data to be used for quality and stock controls.

You can also add environmental monitoring to monitor the environment in and outside of the plant and collect data to create prevention to not to destroy the environment. Possibilities are endless with the right implementation of big data your manufacturing could become top of it's class.

4. Hotels: The Hotel industry is another data rich industry that captures huge volumes of data of different level. From Customer Segmentation, Energy Consumption, Investment Management, and Resource Allocation for it can be revolutionized using big data. It captures huge volumes of data from the HRM, CCTV video and web data. However, for most hoteliers data remains as underused and under-appreciated asset. The hotel and hospitality sector caters to millions of travelers every day, and each one of them checks in with their own set of expectations. With big data the travel industry can now use information to make better decisions regarding its customers.

Case Scenario: Using big data analysis to segment guests according to booking trends, behavior and other factors in order to reveal their likelihood to respond to promotions and emerging travel trends. It is vitally important for hoteliers to be able to understand guest preferences like locations, activities, room types, purchase behavior from frequency, length of stay, time of year. And profit potential in order to increase the brand loyalty and wallet share of their most valuable guests.

Focusing on the wrong guests reduce profitability across the enterprise. For example, if a hotel targeted guests who would likely take advantage of spa services, golf and restaurants, rather than guests who only generate room nights, they could significantly increase revenues and profitability.

5. Construction: The construction industry is responsible for undertaking some of the biggest and most expensive infrastructures on Earth. Construction and building, big data already exists in all the plans and records of anything that was ever built. It is also constantly increasing with additional input from sources as diverse as on-site workers, cranes, earth movers, material supply chains, and even buildings themselves. Construction is a costly and time-consuming process. There are several layers to every project, and average profit margins are relatively narrow. That’s why any and every money-saving measure counts. It’s nearly impossible to flawlessly budget, manage, and organize a construction project. From employees to suppliers and logistics, there’s one tool that can help the multifaceted building process and that is big data. Construction firms are starting to move into arenas such as real-time, cloud-powered big data of large and unstructured datasets.

Case Scenario: Large amount of resources and works go into major construction projects and of course this means that huge volumes of data are generated. Big data in construction includes building design and modeling itself, environmental data, stakeholder input and social media discussions, can be used to determine not only what to build, but also where to build it. Historical big data can be analyzed too to pick out connections, patterns and probabilities of construction risks to steer new projects towards success and away from pitfalls.

Big Data in Construction from weather, traffic, and community and business activity can be analyzed to determine optimal phasing of construction activities like understanding the cause of delays and project issues. Sensor input from machines used on sites to show active and idle time can be processed to draw conclusions about the best mix of buying and leasing such equipment, and how to use fuel most efficiently to lower costs and ecological impact. Geolocation of equipment also allows logistics to be improved, spare parts to be made available when needed, and downtime to be avoided.

In Big Data, It is not about answering questions, it's about creating new questions...

With those scenarios just simply viewed the big data as an important asset within your organization. With it your view has to be more expansive and big data initiative can benefit organization as a whole. If not you end-up sooner as risk losing market share and momentum. However if you apply Big data to your organization it can enable or offer big opportunities to improve your operation, plans and goals. The variety of inputs in big data allows better levels of certainty about status reports and forecasts. Big Data can provide more helpful indications of levels of risk before a threshold is exceeded and an alert generated. They also offer insights that traditional systems simply cannot. If you want something better and add more revenue to your organization start your big data project as it can deliver a competitive advantage and turn Big Data into Big Profits.

To know more about Big Data, follow me on twitter @clemzkie1

Clem Montuerto - Enterprise Architect - Big Data Specialist

"Don't just tell them what you can do, Show them" - Napoleon Hill