Many of us has been there; trying to give big data it’s magical moment on stage. We have relentlessly waited to show the promise of what big data can bring. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow sounds too good to be true – but we kept on searching. And many of us saw a light that keeps fading… that’s when reality bites.

hy do we struggle with the value of big data? Because our goals has been mis-led by the industry. Data-driven marketing does not show you the business decisions to make  in order to increase revenue but merely consumers patterns of WHAT, WHO, WHY, WHERE and HOW;

What’s working? What should be eliminated? Who’s buying? What does my customers prefer? Etc.

It’s human marketers that makes informed decisions with data-driven marketing.

So what role does big data or analytics play within an organisation? It boils down to Data Visualisation and Business Automation. 

  1. Business teams should be able to measure the health of their businesses in a timely manner.
  2. Customer analysis on a dashboard without the headache of generating excel pivots over pivots for management teams.
  3. Calculated metrics for business analysis teams should be predefined, structured and easily available.
  4. Customer Management should be semi-automated (i.e. common user enquiries, purchase recommendations, fraud triggers)
  5. Data integration and cleansing should be automated.

If your analytics team do not achieve the above, complex statistical modelling techniques with big data machines and seemingly intelligent output will not be beneficial to any business organisations.