Talend, an open-source integration specialist, conducted a survey called How Big Is Big Data Adoption? to study the current usage of large data sets in the business world. The study asked 231 data professionals about their experience with data implementation at their companies. Respondents answered questions about their implementation strategies as well as their successes and challenges.
Big data is the term used for data sets that are so large and complex that they are beyond the analysis of basic tools. Companies can use these large data sets to measure precise customer buying patterns and can find out who the “super users” are in any given social networking community. The data sets consist of such diverse factors as financial transactions, social media text and data from sensor networks.
Nearly half of big data strategy is coming from the business and executive departments; 39 percent is coming from IT departments. The biggest business advantage of big data is its assistance in predictive analytics—68 percent of the companies in the survey said this desire for increased accuracy and depth to their analysis was a key driver for using big data. Other important business factors included revenue optimization (51 percent), new sales generation (48 percent) and the maximization of human and physical resources (31 percent).
Big data professionals told Talend about the areas of data that they are currently using to improve business intelligence. The most popular application was social media, which includes data such as Twitter feeds and web logs. They are also using sales data (51 percent), machine-generated data (42 percent) and human interactions, such as voice mail, emails and call-center data (34 percent).
The Talend survey found that not every business is seeing benefits from big data analysis. A significant 38 percent reported that they either found no benefits from the data or the benefits were unknown.
There are staffing challenges in the processing of big data sets, as well. Talend estimated that the United States faces a shortage of up to 1.5 million managers and analysts who are trained to understand the data analysis and provide accurate policy recommendations. More than half of the respondents said that there was not enough in-house data expertise.
As companies learn how to use big data to optimize sales and increase efficiency, they will need more employees who graduate from degree programs teaching the latest data management strategies. Several business schools, such as Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business, are offering master’s degree programs in big data analytics, training students to find relationships through data analysis.
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