Monday, April 4, 2016

How to Make Use of All That Data You Have (blog #2)


John Ferruzzi
How to Make Use of All That Data You Have
This article begins with the statistic, “EMC estimates that the amount of data worldwide is now doubling every two years”. It talks about how business data is in a variety of different forms and different places in most recent years such as legacy to the cloud and from mobile devices to social media. The author of the article, Michael Clark, goes on to tell the readers how they can make use of all of this data. A few of his key points are that firms and users should “frame your challenge”, “organize your resources”, “build your plan”, “assemble your analytics platform”, and execute and assess your analytics”. He concludes with saying that really in order for someone to make use of all of his/her data, he/she needs to be aggressive. He/she must learn how to use the necessary knowledge to make predictions about expected business outcomes.
One of the three points I want to emphasize is the author’s first part of his guide for getting started on building a greater degree of data business intelligence: framing your challenge. He says to do this as briefly and clearly expressed as possible. What I thought was interesting is that a lot of experienced CFOs get stuck on this simple step. One must think about their fundamental operational issues in order to start resolving.
Another point worth emphasizing is another one of the steps to the author’s guide: assembling your analytics platform. After you make your analytics team and build a plan, the team then needs to pick techniques and tools and dig into all of your big data. The author said that there is software to deal with problems caused by big data that more beyond the capabilities of Microsoft Excel. For example, in the article “Tableau Vs. Excel”, the author explains, when it comes to visualizing data, creating interactive dashboards, managing unlimited data, and supporting real- time data discovery Excel doesn’t fit the bill”.
Lastly, a company must execute and assess their analytics. In my opinion, this is the most important step in the guide. Clark talks about how you now must execute the plan by extracting the data then making queries for the data. This is important because to make meaningful business insight in today’s business world, you need to extract and query an abundance of data sets in many ways. By making these insights, you can then more efficiently address challenges and find solutions to those challenges.
Michael Clark’s article was very insightful and interesting, but there were a few points that I feel he did not emphasize enough. For example, he overlooked explaining all of the benefits of getting all use from your data. He also could have explained big data and queries a little better.
http://www.tableau.com/stories/customer/tableau-vs-excel
http://ww2.cfo.com/analytics/2016/03/make-use-data/ 

1 comment:

  1. This article greatly relates to what we have been doing in class throughout this semester. We have been exposed to multiple types of software and I think it is cool to see how the variety of software we have worked with has been referenced in this article. There is a variety of ways to do the same thing within different data systems just in different ways and I think an important point this article focuses on is how to decide which to use and how you use it depending on the scenario. This article mentions to be aggressive in making use of all of his/her data, I think as well, one needs to be optimistic and explorative in determining how to use such data. There are many ways to analyze and interpret different types of data and it is important to consider all types of options. This article is a great reminder of the many options we have in analyzing and making use of the data and software the world of technology has to offer.

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