Big Data for Enterprise Decisions

James Taylor: “For all the focus on visualization and ad-hoc queries in Big Data systems, the end result is often going to be automation – a Decision Management system.  Given the volumes and velocity of Big Data it is most unlikely that people will be able to be plugged into the solution once it is up and running. Their role will be to do the analysis, make the judgments and set up a system to handle the transactions as they flow through. When you are talking about decisions that involve real-time, streaming data in huge volumes you are talking about building systems to handle these decisions. Not visualizations or dashboards but systems that handle things like multi-channel customer treatment decisions, detecting life threatening situations in time to intervene, managing risk in real-time etc. Big Data for Decision Management.”

Brian Hopkins: “The thing I keep coming back to is that [Big Data processing] is about making decisions earlier in the process. Firms that can consume a lot of data make some decisions about what they should do faster than firms that can’t. The typical decision making process in most firms that have a data warehouse and [business intelligence] infrastructure [goes like this]: Let’s go capture some data. Let’s integrate that data together and put it in a warehouse. Let’s put some analytics on top of that. [Then] after we’ve done the analytics, let’s make some decisions and then go execute those decisions. The problem with that approach is integration is expensive. It takes time, it takes resources and by the time you get to the decision making [part] it may be too late. [Big data processing technology] says, Hey, let’s enable you to try to change the model up. Let’s enable you to capture some data and iteratively discover what’s in that data and maybe make some early decisions.”

Gorry and Scott Morton, 1971: “The use of computers in organizations has grown tremendously…. but very few of the resulting systems have had a significant impact on the way in which management makes decisions.”