The amount of information is important, but what is more important is what organizations do with it. Big data is being analyzed to uncover patterns that lead to improved strategic decisions. All these data must be analyzed, organized, and presented in a way that it can inform decision makers. Big data analytics uses advanced statistics and software and analytics, which is one of the fastest-growing careers. Datadriven decision-making (DDDM) is the process of making organizational decisions based on actual data rather than intuition or observation alone. Recent research also shows that organizations that use analytics are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times as likely to retain those customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable compared to those that don’t use such tools. For example, research from McKinsey Consulting found that big data is informing marketing decisions, and companies that use analytics outperform their competition by 85% in sales growth margins................

Discussion Questions

1. Which of the “Five V’s” of big data do you consider to be most critical and why? Rank order them in terms of importance and explain your ranking 

2. Research and locate another example of how an organization uses big data analytics to inform its decisions. What sources of data did the organizations collect and how did they collect them?

3. What are the potential privacy issues with big data? Explain how some people might view the collection of data without them being aware of it as intrusive.