The concept of Big Data has been around for many years, in the form of storing a customer's information on a store loyalty card or sales, but now, these daily figures and numerical values have found their way to do more than describe the past quarter's projections. Utilizing data processes to improve efficiency at the workplace has the potential to describe details that many organizations did not recognize before.
IBM released a video describing this, explaining that while the health care industry is trying to understand how Big Data can impact health outcomes, this collection of information can transform other operations as well.
For example, teachers can grade schoolwork from their computer or tablets and quickly identify which types of problems are the students having the most problem with and adjust lesson plans accordingly. This specific solution can reduce the amount of time teachers spend having one-on-one conferences with their parents on a student's performance, NBC News reported.
"You can actually make those real-time adjustments in the processes of the city, without adding anything, frankly," BM's chief innovation officer Bernard Meyerson told the news source.
What Meyerson also noted is that while the concept of Big Data appears new, it actually isn't because these snippets of information have been recorded for many years. Whether it's through a patient health record or metrics on a local water bill, the heavy-lifting of aggregating the figures is already there. What is missing is the software to explain the result of these findings.
InformationWeek contributor Jeff Bertolucci also believes that Big Data will continue to play a large role in 2014, but before utilizing the data, it has to be safely managed and stored appropriately. Before anyone can run an analysis, they need to have data capture services to sort the data in organized sections of a business' system.
"The true initiative and what they ultimately need to be concerned with is how they're implementing better data management practices that account for the variety and complexity of the data being acquired for analysis," Scott Schlesinger, a senior vice president for consulting and outsourcing giant Capgemini, told InformationWeek.
Whether a company decides to house its resources on a hosted or virtual server, even a cloud, it is important to do extensive research prior to implementing these solutions. Needs vary from one business to another, as well as the customers that are affected by these technological advances.
Tab Service Company is a Chicago based company with over 53 years of experience as a data processing service provider. We provide business with outsourcing solutions for document scanning services, data entry services and mailing/lettershop services. As a SOC2-approved organization, we apply industry-best practices to our approach with clients.