by Angela Guess
Jeffrey F. Rayport of the Harvard Business Review has written an article about using Big Data to predict customer behavior. He writes, “‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.’ So said Yogi Berra, baseball great and amateur philosopher. Sensible (and amusing) as it sounds, his dictum no longer rings true. The Age of Big Data has arrived — and, with it, the ability to predict the future is increasingly a part of a new business reality. Whatever your discipline, doing business today means immersing yourself, and your organization, in a wealth of messy, unstructured, real time data from customers, competitors, and markets — and finding ways to use such data visibility to see what’s coming.”
He goes on, “Advantage lies in a capacity to predict the future before your rivals can — whether they’re companies or criminals. Consider how the New York Police Department is using Big Data to fight crime in Manhattan. According to a series on Big Data in The New York Times, the NYPD and other big city police departments are using data-crunching technology to geo-locate and analyze “historical arrest patterns,” while cross-tabbing them with sporting events, paydays, rainfall, traffic flows, and Federal holidays to identify what NYPD calls likely crime “hot spots.” As immortalized in a “Smarter Planet” commercial from IBM, such insight can help deploy officers to locations where crimes are likely to occur before they are actually committed.”
