Big Data in Operation Management

Introduction

Big data is the revolutionary world in the field of information technology because of its enormous influence on different domain. Big data is the voluminous and complex collection of data that comes from different sources such as sensors, content posted on social media website, sale purchase transaction etc. Such voluminous data becomes tough to process using ancient processing application. By 2020, International data corporation (IDC) predicts the number will have reached 40 Zettabytes (ZB) that is the world will produce 50 times the amount of information. A huge surge in the amount of data being generated that needs to be stored and analyzed quickly has been witnessed in the recent years. For example walmart handles millions of sale purchase transactions per hour, Facebook handles 40 billion photos uploaded by its users each day. Organizations are using big data to analyze and find insights to build an optimal information system. Big Data can be defined using five V’s. These are:

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  Volume: This refers to the amount of data been generated from different sources such as data logs from twitter, click streams of web pages and mobile apps, sensor-enabled equipment capturing data, etc.

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  Velocity: This refers to the rate at which data is generated and received. For example for an effective marketing offer to a consumer, ecommerce applications combine mobile GPS location and personal preferences.

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  Variety: This refers to various types of structured, unstructured and semi- structured data types. Unstructured data consist of files such as audio and video. Unstructured data has many of the requirements similar to that of structured data, such as summarization, audit ability, and privacy.

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  Value: This refers to the intrinsic value that the data may possess, and must be discovered. There is wide variety of techniques to derive value from data. The advancement in the recent years have led to exponential decrease in the cost of storage and processing of data, thus providing statistical analysis on the entire data possible, unlike the past where random samples were analyzed to draw inferences.

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  Veracity: This refers to the abnormality in data. Veracity in data analysis is one of the biggest challenges. This is dealt with by properly defining the problem statement before analysis, finding relevant data and using proven techniques for analysis so that the result is trustworthy and useful. There are various tools and techniques in the market for big data analytics. Hadoop is Java-based programming framework that supports processing of large data sets. It was started out as a project by Yahoo to analyze its data but now it is part of the Apache project.