Who's afraid of big data?

Who's afraid of Big Data

If you or your organization are not harvesting symmetrical and asymmetrical data to create information that drives decisions then you should be afraid, or as Yoda might say, “Afraid you will be.”

Consider the 2011 Harvard Study that revealed; “Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.”

To accomplish this feat, you need data, swiftly analyzed and converted to information then messaged to sales agents.  If your competitors are qualifying leads 60 times more successfully than you, they are capturing those customers.  Your revenues will likely be disrupted.
Fifteen years ago I had the opportunity to help an organization optimize pricing and demand management.  It required mountains of geographic, demographic and supply chain data, coupled with powerful algorithms.  It also required people who understood the business to formulate, validate and optimize the algorithms that powered the analytics.  It was not an IT project.

Revenue management was not a new concept, the airlines had been doing this since they were deregulated in 1974.  Revenue management was new to the this organization and their industry.  Several managers and employees feared the change.  Would they have the skills necessary to succeed?  How would their jobs change?  Along the way, there were those who attempted to slow and subverted the process.  Eventually, the value proposition became too compelling, they were swept along with the tide.

Numerous studies from General Electric, McKinsey, Cisco and others put the value of the Internet of Everything at Trillions of dollars.  IoE is the connection of people, processes, data and things.  Yet almost every study caveats those predictions, citing big data and high powered, predictive analytics as requirements for success in the IoE economy. Those same studies also predict significant disruption.

Who’s afraid of big data in your organization?  If you are a small business owner, can you compete with the GE’s and Cisco’s?  What are some of the challenges you see with big data and analytics?  What is the pace of change and innovation?  Can you afford to wait?

Do you have a data and analytics strategy to succeed in the IoE economy?

1 Harvard Business Review online https://hbr.org/2011/03/the-short-life-of-online-sales-leads/ar/1#