Page 8 - Building Big Data Applications

2 Building Big Data Applications

perfumes, watches, jewelry, medicine, travel, tours, investments, and the list goes on. All
of this activity has resulted in data of various formats, sizes, languages, symbols, cur-
rencies, volumes, and additional metadata which we collectivity today call as “Big Data”.
The phenomenon has driven unprecedented value to business and can deliver insights
like never before.
The business value did not and does not stop here; we are seeing the use of the same
techniques of Big Data processing across insurance, healthcare, research, physics,
cancer treatment, fraud analytics, manufacturing, retail, banking, mortgage, and more.
The biggest question is how to realize the value repeatedly? What formula will bring
success and value, how to monetize from the effort?
Take a step back for a moment and assess the same question with investments that
has been made into a Salesforce or Unica or Endeca implementation and the business
value that you can drive from the same. Chances are you will not have an accurate
picture of the amount of return on investmentor the percentage of impact in terms of
increased revenue or decreased spendor process optimization percentages from any
such prior experiences. Not that your teams did not measure the impact, but they are
unsure of expressing the actual benefit into quantified metrics. But in the case of a Big
Data implementation, there are techniques to establish a quantified measurement
strategy and associate the overall program with such cost benefits and process
optimizations.
The interesting question to ask is what are organizations doing with Big Data? Are
they collecting it, studying it, and working with it for advanced analytics? How exactly
does the puzzle called Big Data fit into an organization’s strategy and how does it
enhance corporate decision-making?
To understand this picture better there are some key questions to think about and
these are a few you can add more to this list:
How many days does it take on an average to get answers to the question “why”?
How many cycles of research does the organization do for understanding the mar-
ket, competition, sales, employee performance, and customer satisfaction?
Can your organization provide an executive dashboard along the
ZachmanFramework model to provide insights and business answers on who,
what, where, when, and how?
Can we have a low code application that will be orchestrated with a workflow and
can provide metrics and indicators on key processes?
Do you have volumes of data but have no idea how to use it or do not collect it at
all?
Do you have issues with historical analysis?
Do you experience issues with how to replay events? Simple or complex events?

The focus of answering these questions through the eyes of data is very essential and
there is an abundance of data that any organization has today and there is a lot of hidden