Tips to Keep in Mind When Developing a Big Data Strategy

Big data, the latest buzzword that's sweeping the business world, refers to both a massive volume of data that's hard to process with traditional techniques, and the technology and infrastructures used to handle it. Organizations are successfully mining big data to craft more precise targets, hone marketing strategies, and make smarter decisions across the board.

If your company is considering a big data initiative, you're in for a change. Implementing a big data strategy is about more than making adjustments here and there--often it's a radical restructuring, or even a replacement, of existing business processes.

These tips can help you develop the right strategy for your organization, enabling you to capitalize on the lofty promises of big data potential.

Know your objectives

Blind leaps make for bad business--yet organizations often jump on the latest technology bandwagon without fully understanding what they're going to do with it. Since big data strategies can represent a large and disruptive investment, it's essential to pinpoint your goals ahead of time.

To ensure that your investment pays off, you have to understand how your business will benefit from big data. There are plenty of directions you might take. For example, you may want to:

• Monitor customer activity and social media during a promotion and make adjustments on the fly
• Strengthen your supply chain efficiency with objective outside source data
• Gain deeper insight into online consumer behavior for a target market
• Identify new product or service opportunities
• Track strengths and weaknesses in your current business model

The more you can narrow down your objectives, the greater ROI you'll be able to realize.

Revisit your current IT infrastructure

Can your existing systems handle big data? Traditional servers are focused on speed, chewing through fixed data of smaller record lengths at high rates. Some businesses also use batch reporting methods with data warehouse feeds that churn out daily, weekly, and monthly reports.

With big data, the records come in large chunks of unstructured and semi-structured data, which are processed in parallel through analytical algorithms. Because the process is vastly different from both batch and transactional reporting, you'll probably need to adjust your IT infrastructure to incorporate new metrics, business rules, and monitoring tools.

Develop a methodology for storage archiving

With any shiny new technology, the temptation to dive right in and start profiting is strong. However, the real value for big data lies not only in current information, but also in historical trending that can help your organization stay ahead of the game.

While developing your strategy, make sure to tier your storage and archiving to give yourself the best advantage. This way, executives will be able to go back and review the data, and even run queries using new sets of analytics to further refine the results.

A few good rules of thumb for tiered storage and archiving:

• Store historical data that is likely to be looked for on quick-access storage media, so it's available on an as-needed basis
• With data that is less likely to be asked for, use slower (and cheaper) storage media to reduce overall costs
• Purge data that will never be used again

Of course, in order to build an archiving system, you'll need to know your objectives, and make sure your infrastructure can handle the changes. With thoughtful planning and foresight, your organization can choose the right focus, sharpen your competitive edge, and truly benefit from big data. If you are looking for an IT staffing agency in Houston, contact Clearpoint today.

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