It's All About The Big Data & Analytics!

EXPLAINING WHAT BIG DATA IS ALL ABOUT

The buzz at the moment is all about Big Data. But how many of us really know what it is? In layman's terms big data is a set of valuable unstructured data collected from various sources such as surveys, research, feedback and internal sources. Most data collected are from social networks, online website analytics, and customer tracking system s to name a few The big data is later processed to reveal recognizable patterns and useful information for the benefits of businesses which is also known as customer insight. The data produced is pivotal in determining the businesses’ future decisions namely on what customer to target, how and what the eventual ROI would be.

Data scientist are usually the one that will possess this knowledge after analyzing the big data using statistical software such as SAS. SPSS or KXEN. ‎

Companies are increasingly looking for useful insights from the big data they collect to further assist them in directing the path of their businesses to grow portfolios whether it be in size, revenue which will ultimately lead to increased profits via a loyalty. Big data exists from the needs of answering the important questions related to the business needs. With the right manipulation of the insights, companies might be able to boost their sales, keeping up with the competitive landscape and derive new business strategy to meet with their business goals. This will later help in improving the operation, customer service whist reducing the risks of the businesses later. By applying big data analytics, businesses can effectively increase customer retention and add up to the new customer base after they successfully tap into their new niche market.

Normally big data is essential in improving performance of the business while accelerating processes in it for more efficiency. The MD of EnigmaCG Abeed Rhemtulla highlights that this is the whole point of big data. It plays a functional role in optimizing the business performance to the optimum point as stated.

THE CHALLENGES OF BIG DATA

Despite the widely known benefits of the big data to business, according to Enigma CG many marketers and business owners still skeptical with the increasing popularity of big data. These data to them impose challenges that they have to deal in a daily basis which require them to tackle in a timely manner to avoid bigger troubles to arise later. Considering the sheer volume of data will contain almost every different shapes and form either unstructured or structured form. These data is collected across various departments and need variety of processes for the different types of data to be combined later to analyze and find patterns that leads later to useful information. This massive volume of data is proven difficult to process with the traditional databases and typical software.

These types of data required a high performance analysis from specific analytics tool that can help the mass volume of data to be processed in detail accurately from one vend to another. This process will need to go through various analytical process before a quality information and pattern able to be detected from the big data processed. Tools and processes such as predictive analysis, prescriptive analysis, forecasting and descriptive analytics will help to determine the use of the data later as it will release a recognizable pattern and insights that is vital to answer the business needs. These processes will help to separate which data is relevant and which is not to devise a better corporate decision further.

WHAT ARE THE VOLUMES OF BIG DATA WE ARE SEEING TODAY

Based on the current reports gathered by Enigma CG  that we are getting these days, it is estimated that Facebook itself approximately released over 30 billion pieces of contents generated from this past few months from over 600 million plus users. And Zynga processed over 1 petabytes of content for players every day. And just from yesterday alone it is counted over 2 billion videos have been watched. An average teenager is sending approximately more than 4.7K text messages from his phone per month. And finally over 32 billion searches are performed this month just on Twitter alone.

THE BIG DATA BUZZ IS GETTING LOUDER

As time goes by, the big data is creating quite a loud buzz everywhere and from the online searches itself you can see how many people has start talking and discussing about the new phenomenon of big data. If you observe carefully you can notice that over 112 million blog posts are written specifically to discuss about this big data phenomenon. And if you go to Google and type “What Is the Big Data” on the search term and hit enter, you will notice that there are over 1.35 billion search results that is specifically discussing things related to the big data. Over the Twitter itself if you see, there are over 120 accounts dedicated to the big data which formally discussed and share things about big data.

You can also notice that by this year, there are already more than 2 million pieces of PDF released all over the web that is thoroughly discussing about big data and these are gathered from the search results when you search for the terms “big data”. There are over 50 infographics illustrated the process and discussing about the whole thing of what is big data all about throughout the internet. That doesn’t count the increasing hits on the Wikipedia itself in the topics that just discussing about “big data” alone which currently reaching 70K at the moment. Starting from year 2012 and beyond over 9000 job searches on data scientists are performed on the internet showing the increasing awareness on the benefits of the big data, as from the recent research done by Enigma CG.

PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS

Predictive analytics is one of the branches from the advance analytical procedures that will be used in making future forecast of unknown circumstances. This analytical method derived from the multiple techniques that also includes data mining, statistics, modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence in order to analyze current unstructured data and process them to enable data scientist to create forecast on the future. This method bring together multiple analytical techniques to bring together the management, information technology and modeling processes to enable them to make predictions of the future. Patterns identified will be later used to predict the historical transactional data which will be later used as a platform to predict the future risk and outcome. By successfully interpreting big data from the predictive analysis will help the company to better manage the future of their business in their benefits.

DESCRIPTIVE ANALYTICS

Descriptive analytics will tell us what actually the data is. This process will summarize what happen and giving you an actual insights of the data. This process will later translate into trending past and future events which will be used to devise a plan on what should they do later. Descriptive analytics will drill down the data to learn the frequency of the event occurrence, the cost of the events and the root cause of the failures which will be beneficial to get a workaround plan later on to overcome the previous failure in which the strategy often can be seen in sales division especially the one that is specifically customer-oriented. Descriptive analytics often triggered alerts and indicators that will help the team to measure up the process. This type of analytics is what usually being used in order for the company to get the bigger picture of the occurrence for their future actions.

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Adapting Your Career To Tough Economy

The economy worldwide is facing a turbulent moment at this time of the year. Fretting about how to survive your career in this challenging time of disrupting changes of economical demographic and technological innovation that drives drastic evolution to the career in many industries affected. No matter how defensive is your skills in attaining trust from your employers, there will be time when the changes push your relevancy to the career away as many related works these days have been replaced gradually by machines or software. Some industries that you may see thriving earlier are now are barely surviving while there are other industries that seems to get stronger than they once were. There are also others that doesn’t even existed few years ago. Regardless few of the changes has appeared to be positive, yet most of them aren’t. Who even bring up the term of “Green Jobs” during the 90s anyway?

The changes regardless how bad or good it were, requires an action. It is essential for veterans and millennials these days to adapt their current career to this new economy. For some people, this might mean to choose a different career in a different field to achieve this. Others might suggest to think differently about or changing the way you think about your career. Nevertheless many will look for the way or strategy to make their role in the career field stay relevant as once it was.

Making a Career Change

Should you even think about changing your career path? Well if the prospect of finding great new opportunities in your current field doesn’t look very promising, then the answer was probably yes. There is always little to nothing benefits in staying with your current career that lead to no future at all. All will look for a career progress but if it always led you to a dead end, then changing your career might be the best option at the moment. Even if you see that your field is doing well, you may want an out from it. Career change also is an option for worker who feel their life has changed in some ways, or having a job burnout – as feeling no motivation to do your job again or either your job was becoming too stressful and boring that you can no longer keep up with the burden anymore.

Changing Careers in Midstream

There could also be a possibility for you to change your career direction because of every relevant reason and sometimes the common reason is because they are ready to take the risk or there are also people who consider changing the way they work for example changing their permanent position into freelance as the reason for them to explore new possibility outside of their normal office environment. Some might even consider part-time work as they want to devote their time to start something they are passionate about. Some might even want to get the job at the place of their relevant interest so it won’t be a surprise if you notice a person that involved in a volunteering work with a certain company are finally working for them.

Create a Life You Want With a Mid-Career Crisis

There could be time when you think that you already had enough of your current career and want to try on other options that can bring again the passion that you once had. You might have a growing sense that you will be a lot happier in doing something else. When you start feeling a growing uneasiness with the field you are working in, that is the earlier symptoms that you are currently dealing with mid-career crisis where you are starting to realize that what you have been doing are not what you are planning to do for next 2 – 3 years.

Protecting Your Jobs

Keeping your job and continuing to grow your current career at work is tough in this time of challenging economical changes. Don’t just bury your head in the sands and hoping that all threats and problems in your current career will just disappear. You to gradually work for it to achieve it. Keep your ears tuned in to your work scope grapevine besides observing your industry’s trends and employment opportunities. EnigmaCG also suggests that you look at your performance and your achievement as seeing how you contribute to the company’s growth might give you the idea if your job is still relevant with the company’s mission. There will be time when you find out that despite your best efforts, the job was definitely not worth keeping then it is the right time to start a new job search. Or perhaps you are one of the lucky employees that the career path is still on demand yet the industry is not being helpful, it is also advised to look out for other opportunities.

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