digital Transformation

Big Data: there is a dire need to get back to basics

Back to basics! Belgian expert Pierre Nicolas Schwab’s piece on Big Data based on his past assignments with companies trying to launch such initiatives.  When I discovered Pierre Nicolas’s prose,  I must admit that I felt better for discovering that the issue of “small data” is ubiquitous.

Big Data: there is a dire need to get back to basics

Back to basics
Big Data: there is a dire need to get back to basics

Back to basics: according to him there are 3 common mistakes companies make when launching their big data initiatives:

  1. They don’t know where the data is (actually; I would add that sometimes they do but they are not allowed to use it. Very often a specific department owns the data and prevents anyone else from using it. This is mostly true of customer data, and I even witnessed that in small and medium firms, it’s not just a big logo issue),
  2. They don’t know what to do with their data: this too may seem ludicrous, but it’s true that big data requires both business/marketing and technical acumen, and it’s pretty easy for many to get drowned in data without knowing what to do with them,
  3. They’ve been told that IT is magical and you don’t need to do anything for systems will do it for you. Well, this is not true, massaging data requires a lot of work and dedication, trial and error, and also the fine tuning of data. In some cases (retail for instance), it is true though that a lot of data comes straight from check-out systems and not much needs to be done… except master data mining and very complex analytics, which often only data scientists can manage.

One last point I would add is often the poor quality of the data itself, mostly when it has been entered manually and rarely, if not never, updated properly. I have known someone who spent his entire company life updating customer databases for a large IT company, this is a never ending job… even though large databases exist, if you own the data, you need to keep it clean and up to date; this is a hug task.

How and why data analysis can help increase your profitability and fuel your growth – Marketing, customer satisfaction and loyalty

We are currently doing several big data-based assignments for very various clients and we’d like to share with you common mistakes that are often made by companies when considering analyzing their data.

Mistake #1: where is my data?

First of all what we see is that most companies have a HUGE problem finding their data. Either they don’t have collected data at all (which often is the case in retail environments and we know brands with a serious number of stores which, after having opened several sales points, realize they know nothing about their customers, the origin of their revenues, etc … they have no chance to monitor anything. Yet they don’t realize the opportunities they are missing and don’t take action.

via How and why data analysis can help increase your profitability and fuel your growth – Marketing, customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Yann Gourvennec
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Yann Gourvennec

Yann Gourvennec created visionarymarketing.com in 1996. He is a speaker and author of 6 books. In 2014 he went from intrapreneur to entrepreneur, when he created his digital marketing agency. ———————————————————— Yann Gourvennec a créé visionarymarketing.com en 1996. Il est conférencier et auteur de 6 livres. En 2014, il est passé d'intrapreneur à entrepreneur en créant son agence de marketing numérique. More »
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