One of the biggest trends in Big Data analytics has been the move toward systems that capture and make sense of unstructured data. You may have heard of software such as the Big Data processing engine, Hadoop, and about unstructured database solutions known as NoSQL. These are popular largely because they make sense of unstructured data.
Information has always played an important role in business, and it actually is the foundation of journalism—newspapers started out as price guides and indicators that helped merchants know how to price goods appropriately, crucial information that made a huge difference.
The role of information is getting more important, however. Gartner (News - Alert) predicts that by 2020, information will in fact reinvent, digitalize or eliminate around 80 percent of all business processes and products of a decade earlier. With increasingly powerful computing tools and low-cost storage, data is currently revolutionizing how business is done. And much of this data is unstructured data.
Whereas business relied on incomplete data before, it now is possible to pull together the wealth of data surrounding most businesses and apply it to uncover more precise understandings. This is the value of Big Data and capturing unstructured data in these computing systems, and it is becoming the new battleground for competitive differentiation.
Take any area of business, and better information makes a huge difference.
For instance, customer service. With more precise data, businesses can know the customer journey of their buyers, and thereby know exactly how best to serve them in terms of communication channels, preferences, and common gripes.
From a product perspective, more precise data can inform which features to include and which are nifty but not actually necessary. It can inform iterative improvements, and suggest whole new product lines.
From an accounting perspective, better data can uncover underutilized resources and help a business better allocate funding. It also can show new business opportunities.
And the list goes on. Better data is a huge business advantage—which is why firms that master Big Data, especially unstructured data, will be the winners in the next round of business.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson