25  The Next Big Opportunities of Big Data

In the era of Big Data, great new opportunities are continually being created for virtually all business functions. Through Big Data, companies can accumulate competitive benefits, which can be conclusive if they also learn to use them on an efficient scale and are able to routinize the extraction of value from data using appropriate techniques.

In this article we examine some of the main impacts and opportunities that Big Data will continue to provide to business organizations in the development of innovative and increasingly competitive strategies.

25.1 Managerial practices

Big Data is having a considerable impact on the management practices and business models of business firms. The exploitation of Big Data represents an opportunity with enormous potential to create new value for both organizations and consumers, as well as to improve the planning and management of organizations.

Transformational leaders, supported by their teams and data specialists, will continue to decide on the data sources that are appropriate (i.e., transactional data, social networks, reservations, etc.); collect and store data on a large scale using the latest data manipulation and storing techniques (i.e., traditional data warehouses, data fabric, data mesh); clean and validate data considering privacy and security in data access; extract knowledge from Big Data, emphasizing speed and its multi- and omni-channel applications; and use the knowledge generated to disseminate it throughout the organization and decision makers.

The analysis of user-generated data (UGC), such as reviews, tagged videos, and photos has become an inexhaustible source of insights to improve products and services to the needs of customers, uncover unknown patterns in consumer demand, and, in general, extract valuable information that would otherwise remain hidden.

The exploitation of Big Data represents an opportunity with enormous potential to create new value for both organizations and consumers, as well as to improve the planning and management of organizations

By exploiting Big Data, transformational leaders can improve their marketing strategies and analyze the performance of their products and services. For example, companies can apply sentiment analysis techniques on the content generated by users themselves or apply text analytics techniques to multiple data sources (i.e., customer reviews) to examine the quality of the information. In addition, UGC typically incorporates geotagged information that can be a good starting point to characterize the geographical preferences of consumers. This information can also be key to planning tactical marketing actions.

It is therefore key that transformational leaders do not limit their efforts exclusively to the collection, experimentation, and analysis of Big Data. The real challenge will be using every insight gained from data to make decisions that lead to greater business benefits.

25.2 The Business Organization

Business organizations do not transform easily, and the value of Big Data may not be evident to everyone. Therefore, transformational leaders will continue to empower employees, customers, and suppliers to change their daily habits and behaviors and guide them through the data-driven transition without giving up.

Transformational leaders will also need to establish who owns and sponsors Big Data and analytics initiatives. They must devise a system of incentives aligned with business objectives that stimulate and reinforce behaviors based on data. Only in this way can it be ensured that Big Data ends up integrated into the organization’s operating and decision-making processes.

By exploiting Big Data, transformational leaders can improve their marketing strategies and analyze the performance of their products and services.

Transformational leaders must set up their approach to Big Data deployment from the outset, which means they need to allocate data collection and ownership tasks among different business functions. All this should be done based on a well-structured plan whose mission is to generate new knowledge that is of value to the business. No need to say that this plan will need to cover other key aspects, such as integration with the technological infrastructure, privacy policy, and access rights. In short, a Big Data implementation plan will lay the foundations for the governance framework for Big Data and analytics within the organization.

25.3 Employees

The role of employees in the future of Big Data will continue to be crucial. As companies continue to have more and more access to Big Data generated by users, they will become much more dependent on having qualified employees who know how to manage, interpret and use their customers’ and users’ data effectively and efficiently.

Employees will continue to be the main drivers of business transformation and knowledge creation. The greater an organization’s ability to democratize data and to expand data applications, the greater the probability of increasing the potential value created from Big Data.

Transformational leaders must set up their approach to Big Data deployment from the outset, which means they need to allocate data collection and ownership tasks among different business functions.

At an employee level, this will be achieved by reinforcing the interactions between the employees themselves within and between the departments of the company, so that Big Data can be integrated into the different functions and decision-making areas of the organization. These emerging interactions between individuals, coupled with increasingly data-intensive business processes, will make employees better equipped to respond quickly to changing consumer needs. Ultimately, employees’ capabilities in managing Big Data—that is, the skills needed to activate the insights generated from data—will remain essential.

Transformational leaders must continue to keep in mind that, while many companies will be able to collect a significant amount of data, not all will be able to respond in a timely manner to the opportunities that arise from the exploitation of that data. In short, without the activation of knowledge, data can never be transformed into real value for the business.

The bottom line is that to harness value creation through Big Data, transformational leaders need to devise strategies to develop Big Data management skills among employees and stakeholders. For example, transformational leaders will drive initiatives towards Big Data democratization, experimentation, and execution capabilities, leading to value creation and ambidexterity in the organization. Similarly, transformational leaders will emphasize Big Data capabilities through recruitment and talent acquisition processes.

25.4 Conclusion

Transformational leaders are becoming aware that the earthquake caused by Big Data is not a spontaneous event. In fact, it is part of a transition that is taking place on a global scale in economies, which involves the metamorphosis of value creation from tangible assets to intangible assets that have special economic properties.

Parallel to the increasing availability of large amounts of data, in recent years there has been a remarkable advance at a theoretical level and in the practical applications of what can be done with the data. These advances, mainly focused on data science, are allowing the development of high-performance algorithms that help maximize the value of data for business firms. This has proven that Big Data is no longer considered a passing fad and has become a key tool for detecting patterns, understanding consumer behavior and satisfaction in a more accurate and deeper way, and predicting key business variables.

Ironically, even though most business organizations have more data than ever before, only a small fraction of the data is serving a purpose. This is not surprising because the challenges facing any organization willing to extract value from data are considerable, such as how to handle large volumes of data and integrate dozens, if not hundreds, of different sources, and provide consistency to the various formats in which the data is stored.

New data-centered technologies, such as AI or cognitive computing, promise to address this challenge. These technologies are specifically designed to integrate and analyze large data sets and extract meaning from different types of data, thus representing a big leap forward from classical computing, since they mimic some aspects of human thought when it comes to evaluating information but without the biases introduced by human cognition.

In summary, Big Data promises exciting new opportunities, including unlocking new insights that can accelerate the creation of new products and services, boost customer relationships, improve operational processes, and even embrace innovative business models. Furthermore, Big Data is the perfect companion to traditional “small data”.

However, Big Data and all its potential will come to nothing if organizations are not capable of integrating it, analyzing it, and understanding it. And this is a highly complex process that goes beyond Big Data, as it transcends the mere capture and processing of information. Ultimately it requires organizations to equip themselves with specialized techniques and knowledge with which to analyze the results and extract value from them.

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