This morning, I read an excellent article written by Inhi Cho Suh, Vice President of Big Data, IBM – in Forbes Magazine. In a non-technical language, this article describes how companies could take advantage of Big Data and Analytics. Here is the link to the original article: Forbes Article: 5 Ways Companies Can Compete Using Big Data & Analytics

In my opinion, there should be at least 5 other ways added to this list:

1. Increase the Lifetime Value of Customer – by identifying best (and worst) customers profiles for the organization, increase targeting the best customer profiles, and fire the worst customers, and stay away from those profiles. In addition, analytics could provide new ways for increasing the length of engagement for the best customers and new ways to increase the annual revenue from each.

2. Reduce the operating costs of the company – In every business, there are ways to reduce costs and as a business grows, this waste gets bigger. Big Data and Analytics help find the areas of waste, and management would be able to reduce the risk.

3. Develop better products – Wouldn’t every company want to develop better products that are needed by their customers? What if you were able to combine the complaints, suggestions, and chatter from different internal and external resources, and prioritize the development roadmap for the product based on this information?

4. Hire employees that are more suited to your organization – Currently, there are a lot of Big Data and employee analytics companies that support hiring of the new employees and making sure that they fit the organization. I beleive that managers should look into the various products and find that suits their company. One note: These tools shouldn’t be the ONLY method for decision making, but just an additional tool for supporting this major decision.

5. Learn More About Your Competitors – Utilizing internal and external databases and sites, you can learn a lot about what your competitors are up to and define better competitive strategies to beat them.

Do you have other ideas on how Big Data and Analytics could support an organization? Please let me know!

Majid Abai