We often struggle to extract real benefits from the large pool of data we have and volume of information is only going to swell in the future. What we need is to "learn to listen to the data".

1. Focus should not be on goal setting but on learning.


2. Many new voices- big data allows us to hear the voices of the silent. Like the customer voice and Workers voice. We can understand our team’s habits in real world by seeing their working behaviors. We can get the employees to tell us how to make the business model smarter and we can use this knowledge to design systems and incentives that make your business better.


3. Addition of sensor data enriches our understanding even further.

4. Wearables will open up whole new sources of data on human behavior and we will also hear from machines, buildings, even animals and oceans.


To read more - http://www.webanalyticsworld.net/2015/06/listen-to-the-voices-of-your-data-for-great-analytics.html

Here are a few tips on how to bridge that gap between big data and the real world. New product development is a field full of quantifiable unknowns. While working on a new concept, the decisions are based on evidence that proves that their idea outmatches the other alternatives. Identifying connections between the data on social media and online communities and the comparison of this with their competitors’ development policies then become their groundwork for smarter solutions. Visualization of data quickly converts the data is understandable forms. This speeds up the decision process. It is important to note that more data doesn’t always mean smarter data. The motive should be to capture relevant Read more at: http://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2015/06/29/actionable-ways-big-data-analytics-can-actually-improve-innovation/

Designing, a crucial concept, is the creation of a plan or convention for the construction of an object or system. We always plan before commencing to do something. Those companies which have successfully integrated both designs for aesthetics are the ones to have benefitted the most.  We can build strong designs based on our data and the following examples below emphasize on its use.

1) Smart car creation - Although Ford has been the first major car company but it has created a fresh company that have employed some technologies to improve the quality of the cars.

2) A/B testing real products - It is applied for the creation of efficient marketing choices.

3) Architectural design and testing - It is used to test the coherence of any structure.

To know more about this study, please follow the link: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/designed-by-data 

Big Data has always presented new avenues to make huge profit in almost every sector. However, it would be our short sightedness to associate big data benefits only for profit seeking organizations. Non-profit organizations are also increasingly using/gathering huge data to drive the social change they aim at. Sima Thakkar, content marketing manager at Umbel and founder of goodindiangirl.com, enlighten us about the big data projects carried out by different NGO's. To have a look at all these interesting big data initiatives driving the change we all want, follow the link http://www.smartdatacollective.com/sthakkar/323866/when-big-hearts-meet-big-data-6-nonprofits-using-data-change-world

As the number of smart wearable technology is growing, companies who have the potential to rapidly optimize their value chain are growing into a digital business through competitive advantage. Customer’s loyalty is also increasing with the changing rules of their digital lives. Their experience can be transformed by improving their understanding with analytics, enhancing top-line growth and through social media. To transform operational processes, process digitalization is must along with enabling proper staff and their performance management. Thus to transform business, every business is now digitally modified to make digital globalization. In this way, companies worldwide are adapting digital transformation with social media, mobility, big data analytics and cloud to make a better business plan than others. Read more about this article at:  https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/digital-transformation-a-need-of-now

As the Internet evolves with the usage of Big Data and Cloud, the shift from cloud data to cloud action is eminent. This shift has large implications for consumers. In five years’ time, the number of connected devices will grow to near 25 billion. From regulating the temperature of the house using smart thermostats to using reports and dashboards for a clearer insight to make smarter decisions. There is a need of a system which we can entrust our identity with, where our identity is safe while making transactions in the background. For this, companies of types must begin to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds. Only then can we begin usage of the delicate frameworks in a network based on our truly unique digital identity. Read more at: http://recode.net/2015/06/29/big-data-vs-best-data-the-future-of-you-in-a-networked-world/

Several sophisticated data techniques have been used to determine prospective services and specialties preferred at a particular geographic location. For example, psychographic data, provided by a customer analytics company, reflected local healthcare consumption trends. Demographic and marketing data, from health-planning agencies and hospital associations, as well as electronic health records (EHR) should be studied to visualize new market opportunities, i.e. new locations for health-care facilities. Healthcare strategists like retailers, are using geo-analytics—visualization tools incorporating sophisticated geographical and marketing data—to determine prospective health-care facility locations. Healthcare organizations should be analyzing data extracted from EHRs, along with health insurance claims data to understand the services used by potential healthcare customers.
Read more at: http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20150530/MAGAZINE/305309978/no-more-guessing-health-systems-tap-sophisticated-data-tools-to-pick

Sigmaway consultants have worked with clients in benefits solutions workspace providing analytics on healthcare plans. For more details visit http://www.sigmaway.us/

Digital privacy is dangling on the edge of the cliff as public cynicism has always been high. To battle this, there has been innovation in Big Data: Customer Empowerment. Usage-based insurance (UBI) programs can allow people to trade in their personal data in a transparent market transaction. Companies thus have data owners that are treated based on their data, thereby increase brand satisfaction and reaping larger profits. A survey hinted that half the consumers in U.S., U.K. and Australia are alright to share personal data in exchange for product/service incentives. Drivers of automobiles can now track their driving behavior with sensors that calculate personal driving profiles that are then factored into their auto insurance. Read more at: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/29/the-latest-big-data-innovation-is-consumer-empowerment/

The quality of big data is more important than the quantity of big data. Three types of data a company should be stressing on:
1. Social data- Marketers are now focused on estimating the number of followers of the company website, and its products now that there are ample opportunities to share the knowledge of their products in social platforms like, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
2. On-line IDs- Data has taken marketing to a whole new level. Data can be collected and used to personalize messages and send offers through mediums most preferred by consumers. This is often done by connecting off-line data with on-line identities.
3. hard-to-find data- Enterprises produce large quantities of data everyday as a by-product of their day-to-day business transactions. Many companies, realizing the benefits of monetizing these data assets are making it available to other firms and the fact that the data has already been mined and sourced, adds value to the whole procedure.
Read more at:

http://www.business2community.com/big-data/3-big-data-types-will-increase-roi-01257959

Big data can also be applied in the field of humanities specially history. With advancement in text analytics, historians can now go through a huge number of historical documents and discover patterns and trends from the past. These then can be used as evidence to check if theories are correct. Research students analyzed a huge number of novels using big data analytics which allowed them to leverage insight on what the semantics implied about the society. Given the nature of historical documents, it is difficult to digitalize and apply text analytics to those. Thus data analytics is being considered by historians now. Big data when applied to history will help bring information scattered over the world thus helping historians to gain insight and predict the future. Read more at: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/data-looking-at-the-past

When it comes to the healthcare industry and its ongoing revolution, Big Data and Internet of Things have become an integral part of it. As more and more health data is now being digitally stored, the seer amount collected on patients is growing at exponential rates. Big data, already used for the mapping of the human genome, is now showing its value in the analysis of large complex data and thereafter in predictive analytics to find people most at risk of a certain illness. Predictive analytics isn't the only place where Big Data and IoT have helped in the advancement of healthcare services. There is now the possibility of analysis of data generated by IoT devices to help calculate medication tailored for each patient and also calculate their results in advance. Read more at: http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/patimes/the-iot-and-big-data-are-teaming-up-to-push-healthcare-further-than-ever-0627156/

By making use of excess of data available and information and communication technologies (ICT), smart cities can now address the various economic, spatial, social and ecological problems. Although data analytics forms the core of business strategies, yet very little is known about new business models within smart cities and urban living. Recent advances in Data Analytics have shown promise than city data analysis and its use can generate value for municipalities, companies and individuals. From relatively simpler analytics techniques to more sophisticated one, the available tools can adopted to obtain the desired results. For example, when the enormous volume of the data poses serious challenge, clustering technique can make the dataset manageable. Read more:- https://icrunchdatanews.com/smart-data-analytics-smart-cities/

A metadata fabric that provides efficient data analysis and data driven decisions, is of great value to an enterprise which utilises IOT generated data. The metadata fabric presents data and analytics, together in a business consumable format and interface. The major types of metadata are maps, derivations and complex events. An enterprise’s first concern is the ability to create and store the metadata in a business friendly interface, which will also enable its exploration, its usage in data analysis and will accept updates with changing business trends. The metadata fabric needs to adapt itself to situations, where data values can change over time or appear in a fragmented manner or even encrypted, at times. The information, regarding the analyses performed by previous personnel needs to be a part of the metadata layer, available for successive employees. When users and systems are not able to search through, or update metadata, the metadata fabric is probably broken, and so it is, when data exists in disconnected islands. Read more at:

http://www.cio.com/article/2939114/data-analytics/the-grand-unified-theory-of-metadata-governance.html

Supply chains help in harmonizing and maintaining the balance between the production and delivery of those goods to the customers. The Internet of Things (IoT) helps in optimizing the supply chains for better profits in a faster and more efficient manner. The IoT provides companies with improved market opportunities. With the help of IoT the usage of the products by the customer can be tracked and accordingly the supply chains can be used to deliver the supplies on time rather than when requested. Change in the market can be observed very quickly and thus they can respond much faster and gain benefits.
Read more at: http://www.industryweek.com/supply-chain/internet-things-iot-opportunities-smarter-supply-chains

With IoT becoming the norm rather than the exception, there is an overwhelming amount of customer data at the disposal of companies. But with huge data comes huge challenges. The challenge of combining, cleaning and shaping data before the analysis. Cari Jaquet, vice president of marketing at Paxata, in a special guest feature in Inside Bigdata talks about why data preparation solutions are important to make data more consumable. According to a recent Gartner report, it has been advised to use simple data preparation tools to first, save analysts time and second simplify the task of data preparation from diverse sources. For a deeper insight into data preparation follow the link  http://insidebigdata.com/2015/06/19/data-preparation-the-key-to-unravelling-the-big-data-opportunity/

Large amounts of real-time data is being daily generated by internet usage. Nowadays, devices are being interconnected and smart products are also connected with the internet. In order to use this data efficiently, organizations need to re-structure their supply-chain. The motivation is not just to use historical data in the traditional manner; but to combine data from multiple product interactions generated by both consumers and suppliers, connected via cloud portals. Supervised machine learning can search for and capitalize on the patterns and relations that they derive in the data and help in supply chain based decisions. Once implemented, they can be continuously evaluated and improved based on performance. The end aim is to accurately predict the attributes of future demand. Read more at: https://hbr.org/2015/06/inventory-management-in-the-age-of-big-data

Big Data is paving the way to the emergence of Smart Data. Huge, differentiated and big volumes of Big Data practically needs smart data for its everyday working because they facilitate -
• Unstructured and structured data aggregation and analytics
• Simplified and accelerated data modeling
• Access and data governance
Big Data is inexorably transforming into smart data. It is the preferred technology used in the diverse application of Big Data including the Internet of Things, Cognitive Computing, Semantic Graph Databases, Data Lakes and Artificial Intelligence.
The nature of Smart Data represents an insurgence in the logic applied to data driven processes. Big Data is important in Data Management as it has the ability to implement action from real-time analytical insight and consolidate all of one’s data in the process. Applications such as Internet of Things automate processes that would otherwise take too long. In context of Smart Data’s ability to increase the utility of Data Lakes is its ability to help clarify the sort of role-based access that is a pillar of proper Data Governance. Smart Data Modeling is preferred in analytics because there is a degree of flexibility and agility in the modeling required for Smart Data that exceeds non-Semantic Data. Along with its advantages for analytics, application development, data integration and Big Data Governance, Smart Data’s reconfiguration of transactional data will establish the fact that Big Data is surely evolving into Smart Data.

Read more at: http://www.dataversity.net/the-evolution-of-big-data-to-smart-data/

With fast advancement of consumer-driven technologies, new alternate ways to measure workplace risks are emerging. Technology improvements like growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) help us in assessing the working environment in real time.  The increase use of wireless communications for performance specification in the field of safety, health and industrial hygiene allow them to safely monitor multiple workers in real time and be alerted when exposure levels become significant or excessive. Another recent trend is the emergence of Big Data and the use of data mining as an analysis and management tool that will forever change the safety and health profession. With the increase in samples, the accuracy grows and statistical analysis takes decisions regarding the limit of exposures. This helps identify outliers (individuals, processes and practices that result in greater exposure levels) as well as gives confidence to the management about the accuracy of assessment of the workers. Read more at: https://ohsonline.com/Articles/2015/05/01/Technology-Megatrends.aspx?Page=1

Big data is completely transforming the way we look at business. Analytics is being used to foster growth in every industry. The entertainment industry uses predictive analysis to forecast the box office collections, gauging the success of the movie before they even start shooting it. Production houses can use big data to plan strategic release dates and to retain consumers by analysing patterns derived from the data. By collecting data from the social media sites, they can formulate plans based on consumer sentiments as to what kind of music, casting, genre, are in trend thereby increasing the ROI and giving improved entertainment to the end user. Read more at: http://analyticsweek.com/how-big-data-is-changing-the-entertainment-industry/

Predictive analytics helps police officers in America and the UK solve crimes. To reduce crime rates, there is an increase in budgeting, planning, installing cost which aren't considerable to the proportionate reduction. Thus more money spending would help improve public spending. New equipment will also assist public safety. Likewise, gradually predictive analysis will also be used to solve terrorism. PredPol is one such systems to target robberies, crime etc. Obviously, like others it too has backdrops as it involves mass data collection. But the advantage that has occurred and might occur because of it are much important to focus on than its backdrops. Read more about this article at: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/how-predictive-analytics-is-revolutionising-public-safety