Big data is emerging, and the latest developments in technology have spawned enormous amounts of data. The traditional databases lack the capabilities to handle this diverse data and thus has led to the employment of new technologies, methods, and tools. This research discusses big data, the available big data analytical tools, the need to use big data analytics with its benefits and challenges. Through a research drawing on survey questionnaires, observation of the business processes, interviews and secondary research methods, the organizations, and companies in a small island state are identified to survey which of them use analytical tools to handle big data and the benefits it proposes to these businesses. Organizations and companies that do not use these tools were also surveyed and reasons were outlined as to why these organizations hesitate to utilize such tools.
TopIntroduction
With the ever-growing need for information, data is labelled as the most valuable asset to any organization or company. “Society is becoming increasingly more instrumented and as a result, organizations are producing and storing vast amounts of data” as stated by Assuncao, et al. (2014). This vast amount of data that organizations produce and deal with is termed as ‘Big Data’. Bano, et al. (2015) defines Big Data as huge amount of data, which requires innovative technologies and architectures to make it possible to extract worthwhile information from it by capturing and analysis process. In the corporate domain, Big Data is becoming increasingly imperative. As businesses continue to implement information systems, the amount of data that is created in the routine process is growing at a rapid rate and thus becoming more difficult to handle. Data, as stated earlier is the most valuable asset that will enable the business to mine imperative information leading to significant decisions and business intelligence giving competitive advantages to businesses.
Hence, to enable businesses and organizations to mine relative patterns and obtain relevancy and reliability from this significantly huge amount of data, Big Data analytics have a major role to play. Ross, et al. (2014) described Big Data analytics as the process of examining large and varied data sets to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful information that can help organizations make more-informed business decisions. This research will identify business and organizations in a Small Island State that currently use analytical tools to deal with data in their areas of expertise. Big Data analytics is new to the Small Island State and businesses are still adapting to this new technology. The research will try to include both the companies that do and do not use analytical tools to analyses Big Data with appropriate reasons.
It will further try to ascertain the benefits of using such tools for those companies and organizations that currently employ analytical tools to handle Big Data. On the contrary, the challenges faced by the companies and organizations while using analytical tools will be discussed in this research. Assuncao, et al. (2014) stated that despite the popularity on analytics and Big Data, putting them into practice is still a complex and time-consuming endeavor. Big Data offers substantial value to organizations willing to adopt it, but at the same time poses a considerable number of challenges for the realization of such added value” In the following sections of the paper, a background of Big Data and analytical tools will be outlined.
Following the background will be a brief literature review of some analytical tools. Moving on, the authors present the research questions that we would like to investigate to get insights into the use of Big Data analytical tools in companies and organizations in a Small Island State, which will be established by the discoveries of our research and conclusion. Big Data and Big Data Analytics as depicted in Figure 1 is now being applied through all domains of the business environment.
Figure 1. Big Data and Data Analysis (Moka, et al., 2017)
TopBackground
The recent years has seen a substantial escalation in data in various fields. Data is generated in form of text, images, audio, video, social media and so forth. One of the key reasons for this increase in data results from instrumented businesses processes. With such increase in data, the term “Big Data” has been used to describe these enormous datasets. Big Data does not have a rich history as the past only involved basic data analysis with the use of simple data techniques and traditional databases. As businesses grew, so did the competition.
The business processes evolved and resulted in an ever-increasing need for data and information and thus the year 1943, marked the appearance of the first data-processing machine. This machine was named Colossus, developed by the British to decipher Nazi codes during World War II. According to Rijmenam, et al. (2018) Colossus could search for patterns in intercepted messages at a rate of 5,000 characters per second. The benefit of this device was that it reduced the task from weeks to hours. In the year 1949, a research was conducted on high storage volume objects like photographic data and punch cards as presented in Big Data Timeline - Series of Big Data Evolution (2015).