Atal Malviya - Big Data for Managers: Creating Value

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The completion of this book could not have been possible without the participation and assistance of so many people whose names may not all be enumerated. Their contributions are sincerely appreciated and greatly acknowledged.

However, we would like to express our deepest appreciation and indebtedness, particularly to the following:

Our colleagues at Ashridge Executive Education at Hult International Business School for their endless support during market analysis and research. Special thanks go to Steve Seymour and Vicki Culpin from Ashridge. We would also like to thank Abhishek Lakkar and his team for image design and Swati Suramya for her valuable contribution in editing this book.

We thank Devashish Bharti, Matej Mik and Paul J.J. Payack, who have participated in our interviews and Mats Abrahamsson, Dr Christopher Ahlberg, Manoj Gupta, Mahendra K. Upadhyay and Amit Chandak for spending time and reading the unedited version and providing first reviews on this book. We are also thankful to Lucy McClune, Judith Lorton, Alex Atkinson and all the Routledge team for their very professional and efficient project management in publishing this book.

We would like to especially thank Tom Davenport, who has written the foreword for this book and set the perfect scene for the reader.

Last but not the least, thank you to all the readers, students, technologists and managers who, we hope, will learn and apply what we have presented in this book.

Thank you!

Atal Malviya

Mike Malmgren

Creating value is the most fundamental purpose of any business. Though this value can be financial or non-financial, based on the business and project you are working on, the sole purpose of most businesses is to create financial value for shareholders. Businesses use various innovative ways and technology to create this value and in the list of these technologies or instruments, Big Data is the latest addition.

In this book, the aim is to cut through the hype around Big Data, understand its less technical and more business-related aspect, but also inform and support those millions of managers that face pressure to invest in and make decisions around Big Data for their organization. Big Data is about technology and how technology has enabled information to be gathered at an unprecedented scale. The good news is that this information source can potentially offer an advantage over the competition or help serve your customers better. However, taking advantage of the technical developments in data and information handling requires investments in money, resources and time. For many business managers, this fast-moving technical environment poses the challenge of knowing where and why an investment in Big Data is justified and can make a return. To make an investment decision in business you need to understand the underlying drivers for how value is created, and in the context of Big Data what will be the likely outcome of your decisions.

It may be possible that you and your team can start and run the most successful Big Data project to achieve a specific goal or address a challenge, but it is not always the case that you are creating short-term or long-term value for the company. So, with this book we are setting out a very practical approach and context for managers who have already started or are thinking about starting the journey of a Big Data project.

We provide tools, techniques and processes for executing Big Data projects on one hand and value-creating process and measurement on the other hand and we want managers to read, learn and practise both aspects of the businesses so you will make appropriate business decisions for making long-term sustainable value for the company.

From first-hand experience of working with practising managers in different organizations of varied sizes, we have realized that while technologies and inventions are highly valuable for businesses, often non-technical business managers face challenges in understanding the true potential of such technologies and using them for the organization at the right time. At the same time, the web, mobile and social networks and other platforms are producing enormous amounts of unstructured data, which can hold a wealth of market intelligence. Unlock this Big Data and you have the power to build sustainable value in several forms.

The purpose of this book is to help managers understand how and in what ways Big Data can be used to generate more revenue, save costs and come up with innovative offerings but on top of everything else, it can create sustainable value for businesses. It can help managers understand what Big Data is and what it is not. It can also help managers have robust conversations with those inside and outside the organization who propose that Big Data is the answer to business problems but are not specific enough about how their investment can create value.

The purpose of the book is to enable readers and practising managers to understand the potential of Big Data, plan to execute projects where needed but more importantly assess the outcome to ensure that value is created for the organization.

A major take-away is the business model and proprietary C-ADAPT framework that can be used to understand how and where we can execute Big Data projects and value is created using Big Data.

This is a book for managers and not a technical book for techies and IT professionals and students. It is important for managers to have a good overview, not least to be able to understand and discuss with IT professionals and consultants. This does not mean that we have not used some technical words or discussed the evolution of data generation and usage, however we have tried to keep this to a minimum.

This book presents enough technical aspects of Big Data that should be picked up by those aspiring managers who are planning to take a plunge into this ocean of opportunity. We have also not covered Big Data hardware or storage in detail but have focused more on analytics and the intelligence part of Big Data from where most businesses create value.

Although this it not a technical book, has two sections. The first discusses how some organizations apply Big Data technologies, often resulting in disruption in traditional markets. The second section provides a historical review of the development of data science and some of the technologies that have developed over time. This is an important section as it provides some of the basic knowledge of terminology and the technology that underpins Big Data. In particular, it gives an explanation of the difference between structured and unstructured data. The explosion in unstructured data is from the conversations, blogs and web pages on the internet that can hold important insights on customers, trends and sentiments expressed among millions of internet users. Mining this data is what Big Data is all about.

, where value creation will be tested and acted on, in the last stage of the model.

is a description of Big Data technologies. This chapter takes us to the next stage understanding the data and impact on value creation is associated with the analysis and extraction of insights from the data collected. In this chapter, we will be discussing different techniques of data analytics from old statistical models to the latest predictive analytics and data visualizations. The chapter will get technical at times, but this is inevitable, given that Big Data is underpinned by technology. Our aim is to give an overview and to provide lists of the pros and cons, so that a manager can have an excellent quality discussion with data scientists or technical teams. An important part of Big Data is unstructured data such as emails, blogs and text-based data and the chapter gives an overview of the different analytics techniques that can be used for this type of analysis as well.