Embark on Your Big Data Journey with Confidence

Executives are being urged to go beyond business intelligence (BI) to create brand new capabilities and models based on “Big Data.” Studies continue to reveal that enterprises with a significant investment in Big Data are generating excess returns and outpacing their rivals by a significant amount. Despite these advantages, many businesses are failing to exploit Big Data effectively due to lack of knowledge and confidence on where to start.

Questions to ask when getting started with Big Data

CEOs and executives everywhere are eager to start mining this opportunity, but beyond the high-level expectations set by thought leaders and consultants, very little practical guidance exists. Many questions remain unanswered, such as:

• How am I supposed to build this business program?
• What are the practical steps my organization needs to take?
• Who should lead this? Is my CIO’s team capable of delivering on this, or do I need to task someone else?
• When should I expect to start seeing returns on this, and where will they come from?
• What do we want to build as a core capability, and what do we want to outsource to technology vendors? What is the plan to build the core capability?

Understandably, many organizations are struggling to figure out where to begin in defining their Big Data strategies, let alone how to mature their Big Data capabilities.

Challenges to Big Data

From a business perspective, a successful Big Data initiative requires a combination of vision, talent, and tools to extract value from vast reserves of data that can be applied to customers, suppliers, processes, the bottom line, and business growth.

From an IT perspective, there are challenges around infrastructure and architecture. These can be addressed with a trusted technology partner such as SAP Business One, that has provenance in transactional, analytic, mobile and machine-to-machine.

The key is to focus on the opportunities and rewards of Big Data initiatives rather than getting stuck in endless discussions about technology. The technologies supporting this space are evolving so fast that investing in capabilities is more important than investing in individual pieces of hardware and software.