Big Data: Managing the Flow

News Article -- October 10, 2011

Big Data Managing the Flow

The way companies do business is set to change forever thanks to the data explosion brought into play by the digital revolution. The emerging market of Big Data is about organisations tuning into new data arrangements that are more connected with their own propositions in an effort to discover new insights.

Companies in sectors such as finance, manufacturing, power, pharmaceuticals, telecoms and retail already have programmes in place looking to change the way they create, analyse and share this data and the knowledge they take from it.

Big Data is fuelled by the social media revolution, billions of Internet users, and the increasing connectedness of our digital world. Global market intelligence firm IDC recently stated that 1.8 zettabytes (one zettabyte equals one billion terabytes) of data is set to be stored in 2011, up 47% year-over-year, and thatv v will grow to seven zettabytes in 2014. Another estimate predicts that by 2020 the “Digital Universe” will be 44 times bigger than it was in 2009.

Big News

People have been talking about this for a while. An article on Big Data appeared in The Economist, in February 2010^(*), describing data as now being a “new raw material for business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour.”

However the question remains as to how exactly companies can exploit this raw material to their best advantage. Indeed, The Economist quotes the CIO of Walmart Rollin Ford, as saying: “Every day I wake up and ask, how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?”

While an organisation’s quest to generate knowledge from its data isn’t new, new stresses and drivers along with the sheer amount of data generated call for better solutions.

“The challenge is getting people to think of the business opportunities around their data,” says Bob Welch, president of CSC’s Chemical, Energy, and Natural Resources Group. “Ten years ago, technology didn’t allow us to even consider this. Now we have the IT maturity to think about how data can benefit an entire enterprise.”

Doing more with data

CSC’s own offerings in the business intelligence (BI) space are growing exponentially. Its Master Data Management solution, for example, tackles Big Data by using an innovative approach to integrate common systems across an enterprise. The ultimate goal: to convert large volumes of data into meaningful information.

“You have to generate business intelligence with an industry in mind,” explains Bert Lasley, managing director for CSC’s Global Information Management practice. “We are developing the processes and organisational components for clients that enable rapid response to ever-changing indicators and predictors.”

In the energy sector for instance, CSC is helping Australian power distribution company PCP develop and roll out smart metering to its 1.1 million customers. This provides two-way communication between the electricity meter and the power distributor company, making more immediate information about electricity use available to consumers and utility companies.

“The challenge is getting people to think of the business opportunities around their data. Ten years ago, technology didn’t allow us to even consider this. Now we have the IT maturity to think about how data can benefit an entire enterprise.”
Bob Welch, president of CSC’s Chemical, Energy, and Natural Resources Group

Shared intelligence

More than ever, companies are interested in the metrics and analytics that not only serve as indicators of past performance but also predict what is likely to occur in the future.

In 2008, Airbus became the first aircraft manufacturer to request suppliers add permanent RFID tags to approximately 3,000 parts for its new A350 XWB aircraft. This means each part’s full maintenance history can be stored digitally, and enhancing process automation and visibility across the aircraft’s lifecycle. CSC is now working with Airbus and OAT Systems on their supplier package ATA Spec 2000 RFID solution for the aircraft.

The healthcare industry too is transforming as medical records go digital and more devices record data. Managing and analysing large data sets is becoming increasingly important. CSC built Blue Health Intelligence (BHI), one of the world’s largest healthcare data warehouses, to help the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association analyse and manage data. The warehouse improves benchmarking capabilities and enables advanced predictive analytics. BHI contains medical and pharmacy claim data for more than 50 million people, while providing a huge competitive advantage.

And Big Data from social media is developing inside business too. Corporate social media communities, such as CSC’s C3, are increasingly a way for staff to leverage experience and assets from across the whole company and deliver coherent services worldwide.

Focus

Big Data and Big Brother

The data deluge brings with it privacy and security challenges; however, efforts to tackle these are in their infancy. So far, there is a lot going on around de-identification – or capturing a general trend in health, in a specific demographic or in a particular location, without including people’s identities.

Google launched an analytics platform not even using official medical data. They just correlated against search data and had remarkable projections – when compared with actual health data – that were spot on. This started with the H1N1 virus in 2008, when people were doing searches about the flu. Google was able to predict outbreaks of flu in the United States quickly and accurately.

> Find more articles on this topic

Big Data and the Cloud: Economies of Scale

As the Big Data revolution gathers pace, business and more specifically the data, is driving IT consumption. The days of the “one size fits all” database – the relational database approach – are over. In addition, new models like virtualisation and cloud computing, either private or public or a hybrid
of the two, make business sense.

The cloud offers on-demand provisioning of processing power and storage so you can scale up or down easily with business needs, and reduce costs as a result of “renting” rather than owning your IT infrastructure, paying only for what you use.

CSC’s recently launched BizCloud, an on-premise private cloud billed as a service, provides the privacy, security and control of a private cloud with the agility, convenience and commercial model of a public cloud. Ready for workloads in 10 weeks, BizCloud takes the work out of implementing a private cloud, and overcomes many objections organisations have about the cloud, such as long lead times and security.

Services like storage on demand, which CSC provides for customers in Luxembourg, and the ability to migrate purchasing or CRM applications to the cloud, mean that companies are no longer forced into investing in data centres or servers. And some 97,000 customers use Salesforce’s pay-as-you-go CRM options every day, for example.

3 Questions to Paul Gustafson: The Economics of Data

No industry is exempt from the data revolution, according to a recently released report into the phenomenon – Data revolution – by CSC’s Leading Edge Forum (LEF). Paul Gustafson LEF director of Technology Programmes explains how Big Data is reshaping the business landscape.

> Read the full interview

^(*) “Data, data everywhere”, The Economist, 25 February 2010