BACKGROUND
Your company, Virtual Help, recently received a report from a consultant recommending several ideas for automating various aspects of your company’s operation. You reviewed the report and you are eager to go ahead. There are questions, however, that raise concerns and must be addressed. The consultant’s recommendations are:
Scanning resumes into a database
Coding the expertise of each candidate into the database to make searches easier
Automating the maintenance of the schedule
Making review of the schedule an automated procedure
Automatically sending the resume images from the database to your clients
A computerized accounting system to create invoices and record payments from clients. The accounting systems would also send direct deposits to the candidates personal bank account as payment for their work.
It seemed to you that “big data” was all over the place these days. TV commercials from IBM, Oracle and others mentioned it all the time. The commercials asked things like “Are you ready for big data?” or “Are you getting the most performance out of analytics?”. So what are, you wondered, “big data” and “analytics”? Should they matter to you? You called up a friend who had a business similar to yours and asked that question.
Her answer explained “big data” as data about your competitors, business opportunities, finance and general business conditions. She described “analytics” as evaluation and analysis of all data. She further said you were behind if you were only thinking about standard relational databases. What she meant by the last comment was that standard relational databases are great for storing your business transactional data but do not add the value provided by big data.
ISSUES
You agreed that big data could be important and helpful. You knew that acquiring and analyzing big data would involve additional expense for new software that would also be required to blend big data with your own business generated data. You would probably also have to hire someone with the expertise to run the software and perform the analysis.
WHAT DO YOU DO
You see the value of having a “big picture”. Clearly your business could benefit from having access to data about competitors, business opportunities, finance and general business conditions.
Decide whether or not to move into the world of big data. Explain how you arrived at your decision.