by Angela Guess
Michael Schrage of the Harvard Business Review recently posed the question, “How much more profitable would your business be if you had, for free, access to 100 times more data about your customers? That’s the question I posed to the attendees of a recent big data workshop in London, all of them senior executives. But not a single executive in this IT-savvy crowd would hazard a guess. One of the CEOs actually declared that the surge of new data might even lead to losses because his firm’s management and business processes couldn’t cost-effectively manage it. Big data doesn’t inherently lead to better results.”
He went on, “Instead of asking, ‘How can we get far more value from far more data?’ successful big data overseers seek to answer, ‘What value matters most, and what marriage of data and algorithms gets us there?’ The most effective big data implementations are engineered from the desired business outcomes in, rather than the humongous data sets out. Amazon’s transformational recommendation engines reflect Bezos’ focus on superior user experience rather than any innovation emphasis on repurposing customer data. That’s real business leadership, not petabytes in search of profit.”
