Companies, It’s Time to Get more Value from Your Big Data Projects

The pressure to deliver ‘more for less’ is increasing day in and day out, inclusive of all industries and business sectors. But if you have a special understanding of technologies like Big Data, your company can get even more value. As soon as you know how many systems could potentially benefit from a single project, it can extend big data business capability to many more functions that may have been originally thought.

For example, your marketing and sales departments are great when it comes to tracking sales leads. But they have no way of identifying which leads are the most likely to convert into customers who will buy. At the same time, data analysts are busy defining a CRM database that marketing will make use to analyze the customer demographics for campaigns. Now a CRM system, in general, is not intended to help with sales lead qualifications, but it could if marketing and IT meet before the project is designed.

How would this integration work?

All you can think of doing is import an analytically-derived "perfect customer" model from the CRM system that is used for marketing in the lead-scoring system. Have you wondered how these systems extend business capabilities? They integrate disparate business functions beyond the original scope of just developing a CRM data repository and analytics. Unfortunately, most data analysts miss this kind of opportunities.

Other ways to improve the integration and extension of business processes to consider...

• Identify what you want to accomplish in your big data projects

After you have defined the primary goals of a big data project, you have a foundation from which you can look for possible business capability leveraging opportunities.

• Don’t forget to Collaborate with other departments

In order to identify ancillary business uses for your existing big data project, most big data service providers recommend collaborating with other departments. This should be done because chances are there that you often find that there are many island systems and business processes out there that your big data project could give value to, and that you might not even know about.

• Have you established ROI goals for ancillary as well as core business functions?

If you could find some value in adding ancillary business functions to the scope of your big data project, then I am sure establishing ROI goals is worthy of your time, money and energy. Just make sure that ROI justifications and projections for these ancillary functions are developed and verified before additional work is undertaken.

• Deliver the big data project in incremental phases

Just because you deliver more value to more areas of the business. It doesn’t mean that your big data project is going to get an extended deadline. You can manage expectations by delivering your big data project incrementally. Deliver core functionality first, then incrementally phase in the ancillary areas.

• Communication is the key

Last but certainly not least, it is very important to perform additional pre-project analysis to look for ancillary areas of business capability, take the preliminary step of explaining this new approach to your upper management and the board. 

I am sure here you will be able to find an opportunity to extend businesses capability and better integrate procedures.