Page 82 - Building Big Data Applications

Chapter 3 Building big data applications 77

Governance of the customers
Governance of the product
Governance of the employees at the location
Management of marketing and campaigns
Solicitation of feedback
Management of complaints
The complexity of all of these processes is where the latency of the system and the
platforms came into play. There are exorbitant cost models that need to be managed,
supply chain needs to be optimized and managed, calendar and seasonal sales need to
be studied and optimized, write-off and disposal of inventory need to be managed, and
all compliance and regulatory management and financial reporting need to be submitted
to the government agencies on time.
We have gone from collecting data in the systems called online transaction processing
(OLTP) to defining and building the data warehouse (DW) and analytical databases (AD),
while pursuing the elusive tipping point for computing all data at any time for any event
across the platform. This is where the next stage of data evolution and more complexity
to information layers can be introduced, also known as the Internet.
eCommerce Interactions started when the new world of shopping and browsing was
enabled with the Internet. We moved from the concept of markets and malls into a virtual
world where you can now sell to prospects across the whole world. The concept of a store
and keeping it open for business between a certain time period disappeared and instead
we learned that the store is always open for business. This model provided a shock first to
many as we needed to understand the concept of actually creating an online catalog that
had the details of each and every product, the cost and any discounts offered, and all of
this was visible to all the people meaning the competition and the suppliers. From a
prospect viewpoint the actual beauty was the ability to shop across a variety of vendors,
with different price models and promotions. This world driven by ecommerce caused a
storm in the business opportunity (Fig. 3.4).
We learned that we needed to have catalogs, prices, discounts, promotions, deals,
strategies, collaborations, newer venture models, and most important of all the dealing
with a totally new prospect. The new prospect is very different from the prior generation
in the viewpoint that they will browse for products, prices, deals, and promotions at any
time from their home or work or any place they will be, and the time of their browse and
stay on your store is very critical as you have their attention for the few seconds. If the
deal is locked in those few seconds you have a conversion and a customer else the data is
now available for others as the cookies that are launched by all vendors keep sniffing
every second for the product search from a prospect. This means you need to compete
different.
The ecommerce world taught us the value of instant analytics, which means that we
can measure the value delivered to any prospect who is looking at a product in the
shortest duration of time. This series of analytics drove the first generation of machine