Ready to dance with Big Data?
Techies may all be queuing up for a dance but some of the business folks are still waiting at the bar. The major apprehensions in the way of business embracing big data are confusion around its value proposition. With Big Data being new and evolving, not all questions may have straight answers. And, vendors paddling everything under big data to cash the hype is not helping either.
Before we start evangelizing the Junk Yard strategy, it’s important to clear the confusion around emerging importance of building Big Data capacity and capabilities. As a first step, a workshop to socialize the following key messages will help:
- The traditional approach to consume data only from within the company is not enough anymore. We need to scrape from government, public and social data to get a competitive edge.
- The outside data is not in our control, it is dirty and unstructured and comes in many shapes, forms and sizes. The conventional data platforms are not suitable to handle this kind of data.
- Big Data is not an enigma. It is a technology foundation to enable the unconventional data ingestion, storage, processing and visualization capabilities.
Once the romance is in the air, it is easy to pitch the Junk Yard approach as a low cost and low risk strategy to get on the big data band wagon. The approach provides perfect answers to some of the difficult questions:
Where is the use case?
A specific Use case is not a must have. Gathering public data relevant to your business and an ability to analyze it is a good enough use case. Big Data is all about finding gold in the junk. You don’t know what is valuable and what is not unless you bring it in and examine.
Are we there yet?
Being lower on the analytics maturity curve is another reason not to miss the bus this time. Moreover, Junk Yard approach will let you build big data capabilities as an incubation project without hampering the progress of delivering vanilla analytics.
Do we have the skills set?
That’s exactly the reason this approach makes sense. The resources are scarce and expensive. It allows you to have a playground in your backyard to develop knowledge, skills and processes in-house. Early development of the capabilities will put the company ahead on the curve and will save substantial money and efforts to deliver projects later.
Can we afford it?
Junk Yard approach lets you start small. Also, most of the Big Data technologies come from open source and are being distributed and supported by trustworthy vendors. They also run on generic hardware machines. There is a good chance that the cost of deploying basic big data landscape might be cheaper than most of other analytics projects we execute. On a lighter note, it might be just worth the big data bragging rights you get :)
The Junk yard approach provides an optimum balance of investment, efforts, risks and returns. There is not much to lose and enough to gain in the process. It’s about time and your song is on. Take a deep breath and start swinging.
For a deeper dive on Junk Yard strategy and best practices, read my earlier blogs