Big Data: A Strategic Lever to Drive Growth

There is no doubt that big data analytics will play a major role in the whole digital disruption that is happening in India today. Organizations have understood the importance of big data analytics and what it can do for their business. They are now using big data analytics as a strategic lever to help drive top line growth, optimize costs and mitigate risks. We spoke to Arnab Chakraborty, Managing Director, Advanced Analytics, Accenture Digital on the rising influence of big data and its future.

Big data can heavily influence organizations’ performance

Organizations today perceive big data to be critical for a wide spectrum of strategic corporate goals, from new revenue generation and new market development to enhancing the customer experience and improving enterprise-wide performance. However, this has led to a war for talent. In fact, one of our surveys highlights that in India, 53 per cent of companies noted a lack of talent to implement big data with 43 per cent noting the need for talent to run big data and analytics on an the rest of the world, ongoing basis. To tackle this problem of talent scarcity, we recommend companies focus on building skills. They should hire external resources, staffing up when possible, developing internal skills through training and development.

Find and analyze the relevant data

In today’s hypercompetitive business environment, companies not only have to find and analyze the relevant data they need, they must find it quickly. The challenge is going through the sheer volumes of data and accessing the level of detail needed, all at a high speed. Big Data infrastructure is getting faster & faster. In-memory solutions will address lightning-fast data processing & equally fast data storage and updates.

Finding the right talent is an issue

Talent challenges are likely to be a concern for companies. Indian companies think big data is transformational and will revolutionize their business in the same way Internet did. Even early practitioners see competitive advantage in big data and are rapidly moving to disrupt their own data practices.

Hybrid cloud model to get a boost

We see hybrid technology structure becoming a force multiplier this year. We also saw organizations increasingly adopting open source technology for analytics in combination with classical technologiesin 2015 and we expect more companies to follow suit. This hybrid mechanism gives companies an option to adopt newer technologies while keeping some of the legacy systems within the organization,said Chakraborty.

IoT and Big data share symbiotic relationship

The Internet of Things (IoT) has a major influence on the Big Data landscape. IoT is definitely an exciting prospect from the Big Data perspective but we need to quickly improve our whole setup to handle the impact of IoT on the Big Data landscape. There are a few areas of concern and security and privacy and data collection efficiency are probably the most pressing problems we are facing. Security compromise and inefficiencies in data collection mechanisms result in a loss of reputation, time, effort and money.

Big data and the end-consumers

The use of Big Data is helping leading companies to outperform their peers. In most industries, established competitors and new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value.

Big Data delivers significant benefits for end-consumers. Some of the benefits include improved customer experience as Big data enables data crunching of varied data sources like device data, network data, customer feedback data, and social media data in real time/near real time and help improve customer experience.