Businesses are putting blind faith into big data. Who could blame them with all the hype surrounding the technology? Most business and IT leaders are lured by the possibility of getting more and more insights about the stakeholders of their businesses just by analyzing the data that they could easily get their hands on.
The entire premise of the lure and promise of big data is that if there is something that you would like to find out, you can turn to big data to analyze the information you have and you can easily find the answers you need.
But businesses might be missing one important consideration: How do they know whether or not they are asking the right questions?
A wide variety of analytics and marketing tools right now are actually doing a great job analyzing data and giving you information and insights that you are looking for. However, these tools and software suffer from one fundamental flaw and that is they work in silos. For instance, you can get a business intelligence software linked to your point of sale systems to tell you what customers bought which products during a specified time period. You would be able to get all the reports, trends and forecasts that you are looking for using the same software. But usually, the software would not have access to other forms of data stored in another system or that is stored in another silo.
If this is the case, you are certainly missing out on interesting insights for you to discover. This is the answers that you were not looking for in the first place, but will provide you better insights. Let us go back to the business intelligence example. Imagine if instead of just relying on the POS data and customer information, the software can also dig into weather data, social media mentions and other types of information. You would know that a lot of your customers bought an umbrella from your store during the time when a storm was brewing and about to hit land. Or that sales of women’s clothing increased significantly after a fashion show was held in town.
Your original question was “what items were bought by which customers during a certain time period?” and you would have been happy with what your business intelligence software would have given you. But having the ability to look at data from different silos, your software would also be able to tell you why. The question you did not ask, why did they buy it when they bought it, is also a very important component for your business.
See the problem? The good thing is that Oracle can help you get more out of your big data initiatives. The way for you to discover more insights and answers to questions you have never thought to ask is to have your data integrated. This will enable to you work with real time data and ultimately get timely results for both marketing opportunities and business decisions. What’s more, Oracle gives you direct decision support. This is when you can easily analyze the data even if you are not a techie.
With our expertise in Oracle consulting in Dallas, you can rely on Four Cornerstone to help. Call us at 1 (817) 377 1144 today.
Photo by Christoph Scholz.
