What Does Big Data Mean?

Big Data is the term used for huge quantities of collected data and the methods used to analyse and make sense of it all.  The problem really arose when the Sloane Digital Sky Survey began its redshift study in 2001 and started to collect data from the whole sphere of space surrounding us.  Within a few weeks, it had acquired more information on the stars it observed than had ever been collected in the history of astronomy and the team running it were at a loss as to how to deal with the information. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland has 150 million sensors that collect data 40 million times every second in its attempts to find new and exotic sub-atomic particles and understand how matter is made up.  Both of these examples illustrate how the world of data collection and analysis has to adapt to accommodate increasingly large amounts of information, and the challenges that it represents.

With sizable chunks of information now becoming commonplace in science, medicine, Defence, and manufacturing, industries have to change how they collect and analyse data that they are collecting. This is a factor that is receiving increasing attention from the Oil & Gas industries where exploration either on land or undersea, may require the collection and sifting of huge amounts of data in order to pinpoint potential new resources.  Big Data can be characterised by a number of specific features;

Volume – Relating to the quantity of data produced, the volume is the size variable that relates to the overall size of the collected information.  It is estimated that US consumer giant Walmart deals with over a million customer transactions every hour and runs stock and consumer information databases that are in the order of two and a half petabytes, or 2560 Terabytes, of information in size, which is a pretty big volume to keep on top of.

Variety – Variety is used to catergorise the received information and may relate to database entries, chemical data, statistical information or physical aspects such as size, position, movement etc. The greater the variety, the more analysis that needs to be carried out to reconcile the information and understand it.

Velocity – This parameter dictates the speed with which the data is amassed.  While some data sets may be large they may have been gathered over many years, others may be obtained as a huge mass of data that then requires analysis.  It is expected that the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will amass 140 terabytes of information every five days, all of which will need to be sifted and catergorised.

Veracity – This refers to the quality of the obtained information.  A geological survey may capture many terabytes of information regarding the make-up of rock formations and gas analysis data, but if it is of insufficiently quality then there is little point in analysing it. Data needs to be of the best quality, which unfortunately tends to increase its size.

Added to these factors is another called “Complexity” which dictates how data management and analysis can become a very intensive process, especially when large volumes of data come from multiple sources and at high velocity. Big Data analysis is now being utilised in an increasing number of fields and experts try to understand the data coming in from many different sources.  Knowing something is one thing but actually understanding what the data is telling you is key to getting the most from it, and helping us advance in many areas.

Written exclusively for Enigma Consulting Group

Check out more of what we can do for you at www.enigma-cg.com

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GST Training Organized By Enigma CG As Covered By Mediu News!

We are finally on news! Mediu News also known as Al-Madinah International University News Center covered the GST training organized by us which were held at Corus Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. The training took place starting from 27 till 30 October 2014 and was a great success as it happened to draw many delegates that eager to learn the comprehensive detail on the GST system which will take effect starting this 2015. Among them are the delegates from Al-Madinah International University and they did a great coverage on the event which were posted on their news site recently. Below we quoted the article and to all the readers, happy reading:

Al-Madinah International University (MEDIU) participated in the HRDF training program ‘Good & Service Tax (GST)’ on Wednesday-Thursday, 29-30 October 2014 in Corus Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. The training session entitled ‘GST for Accounting Treatment & Effective Implementation Process’ was attended by MEDIU’s Finance Division; Puan Raja Roslawati Raja Ismail, Chief Finance Officer and Puan Zuraidah Othman, Head of Finance Department. 

The program was organised by ENIGMA Consulting Group and the speaker was Madam Tiffany Tang; GST Trainer for Malaysia Institute of Accountant (MIA) with vast experience more than 15 years in a wide range of roles in finance industry and GST/VAT practice across few Asian countries. Among the objectives of the 2 days training program are to understand and practice the various GST treatment for input and output tax, setup of GST ledger-sub ledger and GST coding, walkthrough the process of GST implementation as well the documentation of process flowchart for audit trail and assessment purpose. 

The training course equipped the participants on the various scope of GST namely the registration of GST, the pre implementation assignment & action plan, actual implementation observation, tax invoice & record keeping as well as the audit & assessment compliance.

Source:  http://news.mediu.edu.my/2014/10/training-good-service-tax/

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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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Does Job Success Depend On Data Rather Than Your CV?

Nearly half of the new recruits turn out to be duds within 18 months while other two-third of the hiring managers admitted to have chosen the wrong people over and over again. Most of the reason of the failure is not just about that the person don’t have the requisite skills required but their personality often clash with the company’s culture. In that case most recruitment agencies are resorting to big data analytics to lower the risk of fraudulent hiring and firing process. This will help the process to be more scientific, aligned and effective. At the moment, it is suggested that the success of your hiring process lies mostly on your online data profile rather than what is written in your CV. Thus, you have to put full attention to detail on your online data trail as it is a fine reflection of your personality. Normally what you write outside for example in social media can determine your personality so beware of your personal online trail is it has a high impact to your candidacy potential.

Game for a job

While the internet has certainly make it a lot easier to search for the right candidates and match them with the right organization, many companies have been moving beyond automatic keyword research that match the vacancy with the profile. Some companies won’t even bother to look at your skills and certifications written on your CV but more to how you write it and the way you express the word and how they manage to structure their sentence. This analysis will be revealing the candidates personality through the identification of language pattern to determine and later compare this against the corporate culture of the company for suitability.

Through the thorough analysis, most are found not suitable because their lack of fit with the culture of the company and not because of their lack of skills, so to speak. There also company who use online game for their candidates to play in order to assess their potentiality and suitability for the culture of their company. While all applicants play online games that will reveal their personality, emotional maturity and problem solving skills, they are tons of other data and information being collected throughout the session to further determine the candidates’ eligibility to join the company.

Size matters

With the increasing use of innovative personality data still not good enough to replace the good old big data for efficient analysis as believed by many recruiters. Assessing historical data from millions of applicants either successful or otherwise assist the employers in predicting how the next candidates will behave and how they will be the best if they look at the comparison with the career path, personalities & qualifications from previous successful candidates. Now employers are able to use their own data in order to predict how long a candidate will stay in a particular role before he or she start seeking for new opportunities elsewhere.

This will also help them to determine what is the career goals of these candidates and based from their previous career histories, enable the recruiters to assist them efficiently in order to find them the job that they truly required and shaped up their future career ambition. Some recruitment companies might even scan through their candidates’ profile and job offers every month just to know which job that being clicked on the most and which being rejected so the search process is refined through the data they gather.

Selection bias

All these data and analytics information that we have might give a challenging perception of what skills and knowledge do a candidate possesses that will make them a good fit for the post. It is also based from research that prior work experiences and even education aren’t the key indicators that contribute to the good performance on the roles. There also some cases where a service industry worker who regularly use five social networks per week usually tends to be more productive than the other workers that are less digitally savvied.

Social profile

Besides using all these historical data to analyze, the social networks also is another good medium that can supply the recruiters with the real-time data. The blog, twitter and websites profiles do reveal as much as everything about the person rather than the properly written CV. The social media is also a perfect medium for the individual to showcase their expertise, experience and enthusiasm for their field of specialism. However candidates should be aware of their online reputation which they try to build and the data trail they would leave behind as they make would cost them to get a negative first impression. Many recruiters have turn to social media to search for potential hires as they are now equipped with the tool to spot the pattern of behavior and sentiment from their social media activity.

Human touch

Some argue that recruitment should be all about connection and relationship between recruiters and candidates while the technology exists to simplify the whole process by assisting to make everything flowing more efficient. If you are looking for diversity in workplace for more creative environment, you need people with diversified background and experience. But however, data science can never replace the good old face to face interview. Going through the big data will never change the effective ways of identifying the suitable candidates by face to face meeting. It will be easier to impress people with the fine tuning of your portfolio and CV but what matter most was either the person really fit with the job, the environment and the responsibility that to be handle by him/her later. After you learn about the candidate in person – you will get the idea of how good he/she is in expressing their idea, exchanging point of view and handling tough scenarios through simulations that will later determine if that person is the right person for the job.

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The Challenges Of Attracting The Right Talent

Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) –- Catalpa Capital Founder, Chairman & CIO Joseph McAlinden and Execu-Search CEO & Founder Edward Fleischman discuss how they think the jobs report doesn’t reflect the underlying economy and the hiring outlook for 2014. They speak with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television’s “Taking Stock.” (Source: Bloomberg)

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How to Keep Employee Training Relevant and Interesting?

Through the eyes of some employees, training is considered to be a necessary hassle to be added into their already hectic working life. Although they know that employee development training will be critical for the success of the business and in order to keep update with the trends, innovations and further advancement in their fields of expertise. And it is also no helps that many companies organize and run their training programs but contribute to less or no changes at all in their employee improvement. This might be due to the cost and time constraint in order to revamp or incorporated new content to their outline of the program.

Training and employee development program normally contribute to higher employee retention and loyalty and it also helps to give the company a better impression to their potential employees. With an increasing demands of qualified talent each year these days, is becoming a highly relevant subject matters to have a relevant, interesting, training and development program that can cater all the employees who participate in the program regardless their working level. To reach the goal, how a training program can remain relevant and interesting to these employees without putting too much budget for the companies to invest on them?

Experience in catering & developing different training program for various business in our 5 different global locations, Enigma CG suggests you six ways on how to jump-start your training & development program and remain relevant at the same time:-

Invest in Leadership Development

In today’s time, conscious leadership that is a combination of both business and relationship skills are much needed. Over the next few decades, many baby boomers will be expected to retire from their current position so there will be a potential void for experienced leaders. This increase will later combined with the ongoing production of millennials that will make some of the current programs to be obsolete and no longer relevant. Investing in order to fine tune the current leadership development program or creating a particularly new one, a business can get ahead with this pending gap and continued to be poised in becoming the strong, well-developed leader for tomorrow.

Keep training relevant

Employees dread and despise trainings that are not related to their routine and everyday work life. So as expected, many will refuse to engage and furthermore decline to participate. Try to pick your course offering and the participants that will be participating. Decide and check if it is relevant to their work and job scope. Will the outline help these workers to overcome their current obstacles in completing their work with success? Everything should be put into account when deciding the course that fit your employees to ensure the success in the end of the program, either it will improve or break your employees. Make sure certain course materials are still relevant and help the participants now or in the immediate future to grow.

Bringing in a new trainer

In many organizations, the same people will be conducting the training over the years. There is a chance that their course content or materials might be irrelevant to the person these days. A new trainer can add a new flavor to the current topics as they can bring in different point of view and perspective besides adding up new content that can further engage the audience by expanding their knowledge further.

The new trainer doesn’t have to be expensive either because there could be an expert trainer lies within the four walls of your business and it might also be people from inside the organization. Reaching out to business peers and mentors to gain insights & expertise as well.

Create options

Make all training program to be easily accessible to all your employees. Start off by creating real-time offering, recorded offering and online offering to entice your employees further. Also you can give options for your employees to attend it either remotely or in person, considering where they are currently located. Prepare for other workers that non-traditionally work in shifts schedule. New technology has enable the program to be manage a lot easier by providing a platform for it to be accessed anyway either remotely or online and use the chance to get the full use of these technologies to allow easier and less expensive course & training to be conducted.

This kind of capability allows greater flexibility of how a course and training program can be conducted while enabling the employees to participate in the course and furthermore increase the attendance rates and in turn the likelihood of the subject matters can be retained.

Change the scenery

If the training is normally conducted in an onsite training center or a corporate conference room, you might want to consider moving to other location. Sometimes a change in scenery might be good to get these participants to be attentive at their seminars and training programs because it left all the other distractions back at their workplace and their mind will be free to accept any knowledge coming their way. It doesn’t have to be an exotic location but it can be in other corporate location, training center and even outdoor. It is essential to get the employees out of the office once in a while and take them into the neutral scenery so their mind will be freed from all the distractions that may arise in the office. This will encourage the participants to be more engage and willing to learn with the program.

Feedback, Feedback & Feedback

From before, during and after the class, do make sure you ask for feedback from your employees or participants. Ensure they are satisfied and learn quite a lot during the training so it will benefit them. Once you received the feedback, make sure to review it and later act on it if there are any issues that to be addressed. Acting from the feedback received, employees will most likely provide an open end and honest feedback that will move forward. It is also important to ask for feedback from employees that absent from the non-mandatory session because by knowing the reason behind their absence, employers will know what is the step to take that can help reduce non-attendees in the future.

By keeping the current training program up-to-date and relevant will help increase the utilization of the program further. Instead of having your employees dreading about the training course, now they will be looking forward to participate as they can gain more knowledge and insights that can help improve their method of work and increase their level of productivity. An additional benefit in training and development program for employees is reduction of turnover and increase in employee loyalty. Investing in corporate training will ensure their workforce to be able to serve them better in the new future.

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