BI Vs Big Data – the value adds and differentiators that these technologies add to the IT Firms

Businesses are getting more and more data-centric today. But can mere data do any good for your business? Considering how the big data solution scales, data needs to be interpreted to improve the performance: both on operational as well as on bottom line levels. Firstly, data is everywhere; it’s in the form of web data, e-commerce purchases at department/grocery stores, bank/credit card transactions and data on social network.

Secondly, the crucial operational data are the data arising from the supply chain modules, sales data, employee data, product data, marketing activity data, and most importantly the data from the customer databases. Data becomes useful when we use the necessary tools to integrate data in a framework for all the stakeholders to access, use, and make informed decisions.

What is BI?

Businesses want all of the above to perform against KPIs. This requires an information management methodology that makes automation of reporting, dissemination of reports to various stakeholders for decision making, extracting, transforming, and loading of the data into the target system, etc. This is where exactly business intelligence (BI) comes into the picture. BI is a set of theories to convert data into key insights for creating new business opportunities. BI goes beyond the data to include what business leaders actually do with the insights they have gathered. BI helps in finding answers to questions like:

• Do you want to know how data is used and consumed by your users?
• Do you want to build a roadmap for data delivery?
• Do you want to use data visualization tools to communicate with the right granularity and User Interface elements?
• Do you want to implement semantic layers and self-service Business Intelligence tools to inform future decisions?

Why Big Data Over BI?

According to a research by Oracle, data is growing at a rate of 45 ZB by 2020. In this context, BI has its own limitations. It is true that BI solutions facilitate current operations in a big way. But simply taking recourse to past data for decision-making will not suffice. Businesses require a futuristic approach to keep pace with emerging opportunities before competitors respond to the challenges more proactively. It is in this context,therefore, that there is a need to go to the next level by leveraging the data. Big Data analytics has answers to take reporting-based intelligence to predictive intelligence, customer relations management, etc. This is highly imperative for companies to do predictive forecasting to retain the existing customers and target new ones. And this will enable businesses to be ahead in competition.

Big Data is Better Analytics

According to Eric D. Brown, Big Data Consultant, "Business Intelligence helps find answers to questions you know. Big Data helps you find the questions you don’t know you want to ask."A Big Data solution typically comprises the logical layers such as: big data sources, data massaging and store layer, analysis layer, and consumption layer. By combining big data and high-powered analytics, it is possible to:

• Conduct root cause analysis of failures, issues and defects which in turn save millions of dollars.
• Quickly identify customers who matter the most by analyzing their likes or online behavior.
• Use click-stream analysis and data mining to detect fraudulent behavior.
• Analyze millions of Store Keeping Units (SKUs) to decide prices for profit maximization and clear inventory.
• Create retail coupons at the point of sale based on the customer's current and past purchases.
• Send tailored advice to mobile devices while customers are in the right area to cash in on offers.
• Recalculate entire risk portfolios in minutes.

Investment in knowledge pays the best interest. Ultimately the winners are the ones who can implement a risk-aware, enterprise-wide Big Data platform to drive continuous performance improvements.

"Business Intelligence helps find answers to questions you know. Big Data helps you find the questions you don’t know you want to ask"

Business Intelligence systems have their place in business. They deliver neat, well-designed answers to neat, well-designed questions. However to have a neat, well-designed questions is the problem firms are facing these days and Big Data facilitates that - Eric D. Brown

Prime Technology Group, LLC is a global, technology services company with innovation at the core of our business engagements. For more Information visit http://www.PrimeTGI.com