Demystifying the Big Data Phenomenon for Strategic Leadership

摘要

Organizational operations are radically shifting with the widespread adoption of connected devices and environments. These are changing customer relationships to open-ended-continuous data flows through mobile applications and cloud-distributed computing. Evolving connectivity has empowered corporate executive leaders with Big Data technologies, such as Hadoop, Cloudera, etc., to understand customers better and identify why customers choose to do or not do business with them (Barghini, 2015). For example, manufacturing-retail companies like Daimler and General Electric, and banks like Austrian retail bank Bawag, Netherland's ING, and Spain's Santander use Big Data technologies, such as Hadoop. These technology tools provide executives with new insights by predicting customer behavior based upon different variables (e.g., time of day they shop, tendency to buy certain products, likelihood to have a life event such as get married, have a baby, etc.). Knowing when a data point is going to change can empower retailers to interact online with the customer at the right time and with the right products and services.