By Karani Nyamu,
Karani Nyamu is the Group CEO of Nairobi-based IT company Verve KO and also runs Kore Forests Ltd, a real estate firm.
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Big data is one of the techno-social revolutions of our times. This phenomenon has cut into just about every industry, firm and segment of the business world bringing with it significant transformations. There are 5 major ways in which big data has revolutionized the modern world.
Transforming old-school industries: From supply-chain management, content management, and even client relations, big data has had a significant impact on most of the departmental processes and functions. While most firms have always relied on uniform charges or cost-clusters for their clients most big data pioneers tend to rely on demographic and public-credit analytics. This push for systemized analytics rather than uniform data tracking makes profitable analysis very easy and efficient.
Spawning new industries: The need for data-based decision making has spawned both data collection and data service firms across industries. From airline data, tech sales and even industry production, big data has created new jobs and built new industries. Alongside that, has come the development of software for big data analytics. There are nearly 6000 big data analytics firms churning out monetizable data. Big data industry is now worth about $20 billion in the US alone.
Foster Reorganization of Company Processes: The new leaders in big data are especially driven by user-generated content. This is what makes Facebook, Google, Amazon and Twitter such powerful players in the big data industry. They enjoy huge economies of scale when it comes to data acquisitions. Subsequently this generates for them an enormous advantage in terms of running the search engine world. Google has about 12 trillion monthly searches, Amazon has about 2760 million users. These are massive data producers that place these firms well ahead of their competitors.
Avails Low budget Effective data: The development of such small and effective data storage systems have created a system in which even small firms can generate and store huge amounts of valuable data. The presence of big data has also ensured that even small start-ups can source for data from ‘data intermediaries’ easily. It also frees them to hire the services of data analytics firms at very affordable prices.
Drives Investor confidence: Firms that utilize big data have always developed both a real and perceived competitive edge that makes them attractive to investors. Their reliance on big data sets them up for a period of successive growth which most often guarantees profitability and higher earnings ratio. In recent times data volume and quality analytics are regarded as part of the intangible assets of firms.
64% of all IT experts invest in big data, three fourths of all CIOs believe that big data drives decision making, while nearly 70% of CEOs regard big data as critical to their businesses.