Key Learns from Big Data Week Belfast 2015
Date posted
19 May 2015
Reading time
8 Minutes
Key Learns from Big Data Week Belfast 2015
Thursday 23rd April marked the return of Big Data Week Belfast's 2015 conference. It was an opportunity for data experts and technologists to meet, discuss and explore all things analytics. The stellar line-up including HP, Amazon Web Services and Skyscanner to name a few ensured the day was filled with thought-provoking sessions and insights into the future of the analytics landscape.
'Data are becoming the new raw material of business' Craig Mundie Head of Research and Strategy at Microsoft.Keynote David Kemp Strategic Systems Architect at HP David began by setting the scene with the infographic below our current digital universe has gone beyond the decimal system! And with the growth of the 'Internet of Things' it will not be long before data is measured in geopbytes. The big data acceleration that we are currently seeing is being driven by technology advancements, making this vast amount of data much more accessible in terms of both storage and manipulation. He went on to speak about legacy and dark data and the risks of ignoring these. David defined legacy data as being redundant, obsolete or trivial data residing in legacy applications and repositories. Whilst dark data goes beyond legacy data, it tends to be human-readable, unstructured, unindexed, unmanaged, inactive, orphaned data which resides in file and email servers and repos like SharePoint. Legacy and dark data sitting outside the information governance strategy exposes organisations to risk:
- Spiralling costs: DEFENSIBILITY
- Security breaches and reputational damage: SECURITY
- Poor business execution and performance: OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY
- Inability to exploit information for advancing the business and increasing revenue: REVENUE
- Minimal data in the average organisation is tagged and analysed
- Information silos are everywhere
- Tools for finding and understanding information, tied to origin and format
- Queries take too long and are too rigid, difficult to uncover opportunities, patterns or unexpected threats
- Ad hoc discovery find what's in the data without pre-structuring
- Ubiquitous but secure data access
- Real time data collection and analysis, any format, any data source
- An extensible platform to harness 100% of your data, on premise, in the cloud
- Smart/Safe City Improving public safety by detecting high-risk activities and investigating threats
- Catch Insider Traders Financial Services information surveillance and digital forensics solution
- Smart retail Prevent churn, analyse surveys, react to product/warranty issues
- A/B Testing Experimenting with your products is a powerful method to glean useful insight
- Page flow analysis Helps to understand more about your customers, encourage customer retention and how to provide customer value
- Internal data as a products Using self-service dashboards to satisfy the basic and mundane user/client requests
'Data at rest is cost, data in motion is value' Ben Greene CTO Analytics EnginesUpon reflection on all speakers' talks, the industry experts' panel session and lively debates with colleagues I would contend the following as my 5 main take homes from the event.
- Self-service big data analytics will go mainstream
- New business models will evolve to lower the cost of entry for SMEs to the big data and analytics market
- Hyper personalisation is a major trend with all future services and commodities trying to capitalise on this
- Phenomenal growth in IoT means that a vast proportion of customer facing analytics deployments will provide product tracking information
- The term 'Big data' is viewed by many as a buzz word lacking in any real meaning consensus among the panel of experts was that the term data analytics is a much more appropriate and descriptive term