Exploring the Use of Big Data in Business Context
The technology known as Big Data is one of the most impactful innovations of the digital age. Patterns
and correlations hidden in massive collections of data, revealed by powerful analytics, are informing
planning and decision making across nearly every industry. In fact, within just the last decade, Big Data
usage has grown to the point where it touches nearly every aspect of our lifestyles, shopping habits, and
routine consumer choices.
Here are some examples of Big Data applications that affect people every day.
Transportation
Advertising and Marketing
Banking and Financial Services
Government
Media and Entertainment
Meteorology
Healthcare
Cybersecurity
Education
Transportation
Big Data powers the GPS smartphone applications most of us depend on to get from place to place in
the least amount of time. GPS data sources include satellite images and government agencies.
Airplanes generate enormous volumes of data, on the order of 1,000 gigabytes for transatlantic flights.
Aviation analytics systems ingest all of this to analyze fuel efficiency, passenger and cargo weights, and
weather conditions, with a view toward optimizing safety and energy consumption.
Big Data simplifies and streamlines transportation through:
Congestion management and traffic control
Thanks to Big Data analytics, Google Maps can now tell you the least traffic-prone route to any
destination.
Route planning
Different itineraries can be compared in terms of user needs, fuel consumption, and other factors to
plan for maximize efficiency.
Traffic safety
Real-time processing and predictive analytics are used to pinpoint accident-prone areas.
Advertising and Marketing
Ads have always been targeted towards specific consumer segments. In the past, marketers have
employed TV and radio preferences, survey responses, and focus groups to try to ascertain people’s
likely responses to campaigns. At best, these methods amounted to educated guesswork.
Today, advertisers buy or gather huge quantities of data to identify what consumers actually click on,
search for, and “like.” Marketing campaigns are also monitored for effectiveness using click-through
rates, views, and other precise metrics.
For example, Amazon accumulates massive data stories on the purchases, delivery methods, and
payment preferences of its millions of customers. The company then sells ad placements that can be
highly targeted to very specific segments and subgroups.
Banking and Financial Services
The financial industry puts Big Data and analytics to highly productive use, for:
Fraud detection
Banks monitor credit cardholders’ purchasing patterns and other activity to flag atypical movements and
anomalies that may signal fraudulent transactions.
Risk management
Big Data analytics enable banks to monitor and report on operational processes, KPIs, and employee
activities.
Customer relationship optimization
Financial institutions analyze data from website usage and transactions to better understand how to
convert prospects to customers and incentivize greater use of various financial products.
Personalized marketing
Banks use Big Data to construct rich profiles of individual customer lifestyles, preferences, and goals,
which are then utilized for micro-targeted marketing initiatives.
Government
Government agencies collect voluminous quantities of data, but many, especially at the local level, don’t
employ modern data mining and analytics techniques to extract real value from it.
Examples of agencies that do include the IRS and the Social Security Administration, which use data
analysis to identify tax fraud and fraudulent disability claims. The FBI and SEC apply Big Data strategies
to monitor markets in their quest to detect criminal business activities. For years now, the Federal
Housing Authority has been using Big Data analytics to forecast mortgage default and repayment rates.
The Centers for Disease Control tracks the spread of infectious illnesses using data from social media,
and the FDA deploys Big Data techniques across testing labs to investigate patterns of foodborne illness.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture supports agribusiness and ranching by developing Big Data-driven
technologies.
Military agencies, with expert assistance from a sizable ecosystem of defense contractors, make
sophisticated and extensive use of data-driven insights for domestic intelligence, foreign surveillance,
and cybersecurity.
Media and Entertainment
The entertainment industry harnesses Big Data to glean insights from customer reviews, predict
audience interests and preferences, optimize programming schedules, and target marketing campaigns.
Two conspicuous examples are Amazon Prime, which uses Big Data analytics to recommend
programming for individual users, and Spotify, which does the same to offer personalized music
suggestions.
Meteorology
Weather satellites and sensors all over the world collect large amounts of data for tracking
environmental conditions. Meteorologists use Big Data to:
Study natural disaster patterns
Prepare weather forecasts
Understand the impact of global warming
Predict the availability of drinking water in various world regions
Provide early warning of impending crises such as hurricanes and tsunamis
Healthcare
Big Data is slowly but surely making a major impact on the huge healthcare industry. Wearable devices
and sensors collect patient data which is then fed in real-time to individuals’ electronic health records.
Providers and practice organizations are now using Big Data for a number of purposes, including these:
Prediction of epidemic outbreaks
Early symptom detection to avoid preventable diseases
Electronic health records
Real-time alerting
Enhancing patient engagement
Prediction and prevention of serious medical conditions
Strategic planning
Research acceleration
Telemedicine
Enhanced analysis of medical images
Cybersecurity
While Big Data can expose businesses to a greater risk of cyberattacks, the same datastores can be used
to prevent and counteract online crime through the power of machine learning and analytics. Historical
data analysis can yield intelligence to create more effective threat controls. And machine learning can
warn businesses when deviations from normal patterns and sequences occur, so that effective
countermeasures can be taken against threats such as ransomware attacks, malicious insider programs,
and attempts at unauthorized access.
After a company has suffered an intrusion or data theft, post-attack analysis can uncover the methods
used, and machine learning can then be deployed to devise safeguards that will foil similar attempts in
the future.
Education
Administrators, faculty, and stakeholders are embracing Big Data to help improve their curricula, attract
the best talent, and optimize the student experience. Examples include:
Customizing curricula
Big Data enables academic programs to be tailored to the needs of individual students, often drawing on
a combination of online learning, traditional on-site classes, and independent study.
Reducing dropout rates
Predictive analytics give educational institutions insights on student results, responses to proposed
programs of study, and input on how students fare in the job market after graduation.
Improving student outcomes
Analyzing students’ personal “data trails” can provide a better understanding of their learning styles and
behaviors, and be used to create an optimal learning environment.
Targeted international recruiting
Big Data analysis helps institutions more accurately predict applicants’ likely success. Conversely, it aids
international students in pinpointing the schools best matched to their academic goals and most likely
to admit them
BENEFITS
Implement Risk Management
Every business needs to have a strategic approach to risk management. While many things can help
make this possible, big data is one of the most important. It will also allow companies to quantify and
model risks that can confront their operations. With the use of big data, companies can rely on
predictive analytics to have an intelligent risk foresight. With this knowledge, it will be easier to
implement risk mitigation strategies.
2. Understand Customers Better
Businesses must understand their customers, and big data will make this possible. From website visits to
social media interactions, big data will reveal a lot about your customers. It will also allow the business
to create customer profiles and buyer personas. When you understand them better, you can improve
your products and services. It allows you to deliver the highest level of satisfaction. This can also help in
building customer loyalty.
3. Know Your Competition
Big data also provides the opportunity to get to know your competitors. For instance, it can provide
information about their pricing models and how it is perceived by the customers. You will also learn
about the customers’ perceptions of your competitors. Plus, it will help you determine how they are
performing online, such as their social media engagement.
4. Personalize Your Marketing
Marketing can make or break your business. For its success, one of the most important is
personalization. This is another area where you can use big data. Because it lets you understand your
customers, you can create marketing campaigns that will target a specific niche or segment. It can offer
insights that will allow marketers to create high-converting materials.
5. Identify Trends
Through big data, it is also possible for businesses to identify trends, which can be useful in product
research and development. From customer behaviors to buying patterns, big data will provide the
management with the information it needs to analyze how trends will change over time, and in turn, will
give the business the time to prepare for these changes. Selecting survey methods will play key role in
doing collecting sample data, survey research and analyzing the information to make decisions
1. Better customer insight
When a modern business turns to data to understand its customers, whether individually or in
categories, it has a wide range of sources to choose from. Big data sources that shed light on customers
include the following:
Traditional sources of customer data, such as purchases and support calls.
External sources, such as financial transactions and credit reports.
Social media activity.
Data from internal and external surveys.
Computer cookies.
Clickstream analysis of e-commerce activity is especially useful in an increasingly digital marketplace,
shedding light on how customers navigate through a company's various webpages and menus to find
products and services. Companies can see which items customers added to their carts but perhaps
removed or later abandoned without purchasing; this provides important clues as to what customers
might like to buy, even if they don't make a purchase.
Not only online stores, but brick-and-mortar locations can also glean useful understanding of their
customers, often by analyzing video to learn how visitors navigate through a physical store compared
with their navigation of a website.
2. Increased market intelligence
Just as big data can help us analyze the complex shopping behavior of customers in more detail, it can
also deepen and broaden our understanding of market dynamics.
Social media is a common source of market intelligence for product categories ranging from breakfast
cereal to vacation packages. For almost any commercial transaction you can imagine, there are people
out there sharing their preferences, their experiences, their recommendations … and their selfies. Yes,
even of their breakfast fare. These shared opinions are invaluable for marketers.
In addition to competitive analysis, big data can also help in product development -- by prioritizing
different customer preferences, for example.
In fact, big data does not just assist with modern market intelligence; in almost any e-commerce or
online market, almost all market intelligence is driven by diverse, ever-changing data.
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The ultimate guide to big data for businesses
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8 benefits of using big data for businesses
Big data is a great resource for driving smart business decisions and changes. Here are eight ways that
the use of big data is improving how business gets done.
Donald Farmer, TreeHive Strategy
Published: 30 May 2024
When business leaders hear the term big data, they most naturally think of the massive volumes of data
available today. This data is created by e-commerce and omnichannel marketing systems, IoT-connected
devices or business applications that generate ever more detailed information about transactions and
activities. And those are just a few examples.
The sheer scale of the data is daunting, maybe even overwhelming in some cases. But there are great
business benefits to be gained by analyzing sets of big data. We'll explore some of these benefits below,
but first let's get a clear idea of what we're talking about -- and there's more to it than the amount of
data.
What is big data?
The term isn't entirely misleading -- the volume of data involved can indeed be staggering -- but don't
mistake it for a complete definition. Big data platforms are certainly optimized for large data sets, but
I've seen many data lakes built to store big data that were smaller than conventional data warehouses in
the same organization. Nevertheless, it's generally true that big data tends to be pretty big.
So, what else is involved? One key aspect is the multiplicity of data types involved. A single big data
system might contain XML documents, raw log files, text files, images, video, audio and traditional
structured data. This is commonly called the variety of big data and being able to store and process
some of these data types -- especially images, video and audio files, which can be very large -- does
require a system that's capable of scaling quickly and easily.
This article is part of
The ultimate guide to big data for businesses
Which also includes:
8 benefits of using big data for businesses
What a big data strategy includes and how to build one
10 big data challenges and how to address them
Another twist to this is the velocity of the data. That refers to the speed at which it is generated or
updated. For example, those log files from monitoring systems, mobile applications, websites and other
sources often consist of a continuous stream of readings, perhaps thousands in an hour. You can have
big data without such velocity, but a well-designed big data architecture should be able to handle it.
Many analysts and practitioners have expanded these V's of big data to include other characteristics,
such as veracity and variability. In summary, though, big data typically is a resource with many types of
data and the potential for great scale and rapid updates. It also encompasses new ways of storing,
processing, managing and analyzing the data that drives business decisions. These new techniques are
what enable the big data benefits that business executives and IT teams alike are seeking.
Now, let's look at eight ways in which big data can improve the way we do business.
Chart showing some of the benefits that businesses can get from using big [Link] are some of the
benefits that businesses can get from using big data.
1. Better customer insight
When a modern business turns to data to understand its customers, whether individually or in
categories, it has a wide range of sources to choose from. Big data sources that shed light on customers
include the following:
Traditional sources of customer data, such as purchases and support calls.
External sources, such as financial transactions and credit reports.
Social media activity.
Data from internal and external surveys.
Computer cookies.
Clickstream analysis of e-commerce activity is especially useful in an increasingly digital marketplace,
shedding light on how customers navigate through a company's various webpages and menus to find
products and services. Companies can see which items customers added to their carts but perhaps
removed or later abandoned without purchasing; this provides important clues as to what customers
might like to buy, even if they don't make a purchase.
Not only online stores, but brick-and-mortar locations can also glean useful understanding of their
customers, often by analyzing video to learn how visitors navigate through a physical store compared
with their navigation of a website.
2. Increased market intelligence
Just as big data can help us analyze the complex shopping behavior of customers in more detail, it can
also deepen and broaden our understanding of market dynamics.
Social media is a common source of market intelligence for product categories ranging from breakfast
cereal to vacation packages. For almost any commercial transaction you can imagine, there are people
out there sharing their preferences, their experiences, their recommendations … and their selfies. Yes,
even of their breakfast fare. These shared opinions are invaluable for marketers.
In addition to competitive analysis, big data can also help in product development -- by prioritizing
different customer preferences, for example.
In fact, big data does not just assist with modern market intelligence; in almost any e-commerce or
online market, almost all market intelligence is driven by diverse, ever-changing data.
3. Agile supply chain management
Whether because of pandemic-driven shortages of toilet paper and other goods, the trade disruption of
Brexit or a ship stuck in the Suez Canal, you should be aware by now that modern supply chains are
surprisingly fragile.
It's surprising because, mostly, we don't notice our supply chains until there is a truly major disruption.
Big data that enables predictive analytics, often in near real time, helps to keep our global network of
demand, production and distribution working well for the most part.
This is possible because big data systems can integrate data on customer trends from e-commerce sites
and retail applications with supplier data, real-time pricing and even shipping and weather information
to provide a level of information not seen before.
It's not just large enterprises that benefit from these insights. Even modestly sized e-commerce
businesses can use customer intelligence and real-time pricing to optimize business decisions such as
stock levels and risk reduction, or temporary or seasonal staffing.
4. Smarter recommendations and audience targeting
In our lives as consumers, we are now so familiar with recommendation engines that we might not be
aware of how much they have evolved since the advent of big data. At one time, the predictive analysis
for recommendation engines was quite simple: association rules, which found those common items in
market baskets. You can still expect to find this as a feature on e-commerce websites telling us that
customers who bought widgets also bought fidgets.
Newer recommendation systems are much smarter than that, building on the sophisticated customer
insights we have already discussed, with the result that they can be more sensitive to demographics and
customer behavior. These systems aren't limited to e-commerce, either. A friendly waiter's
recommendations might well be data-driven -- decisions prompted by a point-of-sale system that
evaluates stock levels in the pantry, popular combos, high-profit items and even social media trends.
When you share a picture of your meal, you are providing yet more input for the big data engines to
digest.
Streaming content providers use even more sophisticated techniques. They might not even ask
customers what they want to see next: Even before the current movie, program or song finishes, the
next selection fades in, keeping viewers binge-watching by utilizing their own preferences combined
with a great deal of big data analysis gleaned from other users and social media.
5. Data-driven innovation
Innovation is not just a matter of inspiration. There's a great deal of hard work in identifying subject
areas that are promising for new efforts and experiments.
The various big data tools and technologies that are available can enhance R&D, often leading to the
development of novel products and services. Sometimes the data -- cleansed, prepared and governed
for sharing -- becomes a product in itself. The London Stock Exchange, for example, now makes more
money from selling data and analysis than it does from securities trading.
Data by itself, even with the best big data tools, will not produce new insights. We still need the human
element: the understanding and imagination of data scientists, BI analysts and other analytics
professionals. However, the breadth and scope of big data, especially when stored in a single Hadoop
cluster or cloud data lake, can lead teams to a new understanding of trends that would be difficult to
glean in a less integrated environment.
6. Diverse use cases for data sets
Several times in my career, I've seen cases where data that was carefully prepared and modeled for one
business purpose was completely unsuitable for another one.
For example, the marketing team at a credit card issuer wanted to understand how customers used the
different cards they had in their wallets. The analysis was made more difficult by the numerous failed
swipes and canceled transactions that were common at the time, often due to connection problems
with the payment terminal or flaws in the magnetic stripe on the cards. So, the data was carefully
cleaned up to remove the failed transactions.
The result was a data set that was great for the initial marketing application. But the fraud prevention
team couldn't use it because they wanted to see those failed transactions that might have left clues
about fraudulent card usage. Not only that, but the removed data was being archived onto tape storage
and therefore was hard to access.
In the age of big data, we can store all of the raw data as is in a data lake and only apply data models to
it when we need to use it for particular analytics applications. We can then design data pipelines
specifically for each use case or just run ad hoc queries to populate the analytics processes. This enables
great flexibility in the number and types of applications that can be run against the same data set.
7. Improved business operations
Business activity of all kinds can be improved by using big data. It helps optimize business processes to
generate cost savings, boost productivity and increase customer satisfaction. Hiring and HR
management can become more effective. Better fraud detection, risk management and cybersecurity
planning help organizations reduce financial losses and avoid potential business threats.
One of the most interesting and rewarding applications for big data analytics is to improve physical
operations. For example, the combination of big data and data science can inform predictive
maintenance schedules to reduce costly repairs and downtime for critical equipment and systems.
You can start by analyzing the age, condition, location, warranty and service details. However, things
such as the security and HVAC systems in facilities are notably affected by other business activities, such
as staffing and production schedules, which might, in turn, be influenced by sales cycles and, therefore,
by customer behavior. Well-integrated sets of big data pull all this together to help you maintain
equipment at the optimal time.
8. Supporting and improving AI and generative models
Artificial intelligence, especially generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs), is transforming
business operations and innovation. These advanced AI systems rely heavily on vast amounts of training
data to learn patterns, understand context and generate humanlike text, images and other content.
Within the context of your own business, big data enables the customization and improvement of GenAI
tools.
One area of AI that holds great promise is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). This approach
combines the strengths of LLMs with the ability to query relevant information from extensive knowledge
bases, such as your own corporate data. By harnessing big data technologies, organizations can build
comprehensive knowledge repositories that RAG models can access in real time, generating more
accurate, informative and contextually relevant responses.
For example, a customer service chatbot powered by RAG could draw upon a company's entire product
information history, user manuals and customer interactions to provide highly personalized and
effective support. Similarly, a content creation platform could use RAG to generate articles, reports or
marketing copy incorporating the latest industry data and trends.
Big data empowers businesses to continuously update and refine their AI models based on new
information and user feedback. For example, by collecting and analyzing data on how users interact with
GenAI applications, companies can pinpoint areas for improvement, fine-tune their models and create
more engaging and valuable user experiences over time