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Chapter 9 Questions and Case Study

1. Big data analytics involves collecting, processing, analyzing large datasets to discover patterns and correlations to help make reliable inferences for decision making. The key differences between big data analytics and regular analytics are the type, volume, and variety of data analyzed, as well as the sophisticated tools and techniques required for big data. 2. Critical success factors for big data analytics implementation include data quality and integrity, management commitment, sufficient resources, human capability, system quality, perceived benefits, an analytical culture, and operating in an environment where analytics are commonly used. 3. Major challenges of big data analytics implementation are the shortage of professionals, need for data synchronization across sources, difficulty obtaining meaningful insights, and effectively sharing insights across an

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
214 views9 pages

Chapter 9 Questions and Case Study

1. Big data analytics involves collecting, processing, analyzing large datasets to discover patterns and correlations to help make reliable inferences for decision making. The key differences between big data analytics and regular analytics are the type, volume, and variety of data analyzed, as well as the sophisticated tools and techniques required for big data. 2. Critical success factors for big data analytics implementation include data quality and integrity, management commitment, sufficient resources, human capability, system quality, perceived benefits, an analytical culture, and operating in an environment where analytics are commonly used. 3. Major challenges of big data analytics implementation are the shortage of professionals, need for data synchronization across sources, difficulty obtaining meaningful insights, and effectively sharing insights across an

Uploaded by

chris walters
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Chapter 9 Questions for Discussion

1. Big data has been defined differently by different scholars from different academic

backgrounds. According to Sun et al. (2021), big data is data which exceeds the

capability of the traditional data an alytic tools. Additionally, big data is in complex large

volumes of data sets that may be structred,semi structured or unstructured and mostly is

in petabytes, zetabytes and even exabytes. Also big data requires specialized bigdata

softwares and architecture solutions to handle, especially the modern data software’s such

as the data analytics are recomended.Moreover its generated and transmitted from a wide

range of sources.Further,Sun highlighted that big data has three main attributes.First

volume;it is in large amounts of data sets.Secondly,Velocity;it must be processed and

analysed at a lightning speed.And lastly,variety;it is collected from many different data

sources and forms such as numbers,texts,images,videos and audios.Besides Sun also

noted that roughly 95% of big data is unstructured and thus cannot easily fit into a

traditional data analysis model.

Big data is very important as it is used by many companies in all business fields to

provide beter customer services,to improve business operations,to increase company

returns,to provide personalized marketing and most importantly to give organizations a

competitive edge in the highly competitive business world.Additionally,big data is also

used by medical researchers to identify disease symptoms and the best medication for a

particular disease .For example big data can be used in organizations in the following

ways. In energy industries ;big data helps oil and gas companies to locate potential

drilling points and manage pipeline fluid transport .In financial services, big data is used

by firms to manage risk and right time analysis of data in the market .In manufacturing
and transportation companies ,big data is used to optimize transportation channels and

managing supply chains .The government may use bigdata for crime detection and

prevention , emergency responses and smart city initiatives.

Big data comes from many different sources such as mobile apps, social networks,

customer data bases, medical records, documents, clickstream logs in the internet ,

transaction systems among other data sources.

2. The future of big data is great, big data will not lose its popularity, however to maintain

its popularity it will have to keep advancing to cope up with the advancement in

technology. The future will see organizations making use of big data to put together data

analysis from digital world to find solutions for world problems.Additionally, future

looks bright for those careers related to big data. For instance the U.S bureau of labor

statistics predicts information technology and computer occupations to grow by 13%

between 2022 and 2026 (Naeem, 2022).Also,big data is expected to be extensively used

in detecting all forms of frauds such as cumber frauds and electronic frauds as they get

planned. In banks big data is expected to improve customer experiences. In the

government big data is anticipated to improve government services extensively such as

healthcare and public safety.The future of bigdata also calls for highly trained data

experts. Furthermore, data volumes are anticipated to increase beyond 175 zetabytes by

2025.A great increase of internet users is also anticipated with everything from business

communication,to shopping done online.Also ,great developments in technology are

anticipated as a result of boost from big data with self-driven cars and fraud detection

devices anticipated. Great data sciantists are expected to increase greatly.On the other
hand data privacy will remain a very hot issue even with development and advancement

of big data.

3. Big data analytics is the process of collecting, processing, cleaning and analyzing large

data sets to discover, correlations and data patterns to help make some reliable inferences

which can help in decision making.The main difference between bigdata analytics and

regular analytics is the type of data analyzed. Further, the tools and techniques of

analyzing big data analytics are more sophisticated than the ones used for regular data

analytics. They also differ in applications and the level of accuracy needed. For instance,

in terms of type of data to be analyzed they differ by the nature of data. The nature of big

data has three main attributes; Volume; the amount of data is very large as opposed to

regular data where the amount of data is smaller, Variety; in big data there are various

data sources and in various forms as opposed to regular data which has limited variety of

data and Velocity; the speed of generating big data from source to a particular destination

is very high as opposed to the speed of regular data analytics which is slightly lower.

Also, the traditional or regular data is usually structured and majorly measured in

megabytes and gigabytes, on the other hand big data is measured in petabytes, terabytes

and even exabytes. In terms of tools used big data analytics use tools with sophisticated

technology like parallel computing to manage the huge amounts of data as opposed to

traditional analytics. Some of the sophisticated tools used by big data analytics include;

Microsoft HDInsight, analytics, sky tree, spark, splice machine, talend, Xplenty and

lumify. On the other hand tools used for regular data analytics are simple and can easily

beused for predictive modelling as the data is not too complicated. Some common routine

data analytics tools used include; python,SAS , Excel, R ,power BI, apache spark and
tableau .In terms of application, big data analytics is mostly used in several industries like

retail, banking , telecommunication etc., where there is large data sets to be

prossesed,while,regular data analytics are majorly used in healthcare and tracvel

industries where there is no complicated data sets to be managed. Therefore, to

compound it all,big data analytics is majorly used where there is complex data sets and

very important decisions to be taken from it such as identifying new marketing

opportunities and customer personalization.On the other hand regular analytics are used

in analysisng low volumes of data.

4. The critical success factors for big data analytics are fundamental when implementing

bigdata analytics in projects so as to overcome the challenges attached to big data

analytics implementation. There are several critical success factors for big data analytics

to consider. Firstly consider, data integrity and quality, the higher the quality and level of

data integrity the more successful the bigdata analytics is thus organizations should strive

to produce high data qualities and high levels of integrity in data collection. Secondly,

management commitment is another important critical success factor. The higher the

management commitment to data analytics the higher the level of success experienced

from the data analytics. Therefore, data analysts should ensure a good rapport with the

management for them to show their commitment in its implementation in business

organizations.Thirdly,the organization capacity in terms of resources are also key to

successful implementation of big data analytics.Following,the human capability is also

key,as how successful the bigdata nalytics is implemented depends on the skills of the

person implementing theme.Suceedingly,the data analytics system quality is also an

important big data analytics factor to consider as the higher the quality of the system the
higher the reliability of results the system will produce.The perceived benefit of the

system also deytermines how successful it is during the implementation.If the

management anticipates many benefits from the bigdata analytics system its

implementation and use will be highly successful as it will have the manbagement full

backing.Analytics culture,an organization which has a culture of using data analytics may

easily support the implementation of big data analytics much easier than one without

such a culture.Lastly the organization environment is also a key sucsses

factor.Organizations operating in business enviroments where analytics are used will

easily adopt bigdata analytics so as to be able to survive the high competition level in

such an industry

5. The big challenges one should be mindful of when considering implementing big data

analytics may include. Shortage of big data analysis professionals; With most

organizations adopting big data analytics experts having the big data analytics have

become scares thus a key challenge to consider when considering its implementation.

Additionally, the great need for data synchronization in different data sources is a major

challenge to consider. As data sets grow bigger and more diverse the challenge of

incorporating them in one analytical platform arises. Failure to plan for this may lead to

wrong results and insights.Also,to get meaningful and and accurate insights is a

challenge.Since the information from the data nanlytics may be accsible to only to a

particulat department big companies may face the challenge of mending the wide gap in

an effective way to benefit the whole organization .Too,putting the large amount of data

in the big data platform is not easy.With the amounts and variety of data growing so fast

every day the data engineer can be overwhelmed. This calls for organizations to consider
making data easily accssesible and convenient for managers and other brand

owners.Further,uncertainity of the data land scape is another key challenge while

implementing bigdata analytics.With great developments in new technology each day it

has become very difficult for most companies to know which technogy is the best to use

without introduction of risks and new problems.Data storage is also a key challenge.With

tremendous growth of business organizations the amount of data is becoming massive

posing a real storage threat. The well-known data storage options like data warehouses

and data lakes normally store unstructured data and structured data in its original

format.The real problem arises due to the large amaonts of data organizations may try to

put together the two types of data thus resulting into errors such as logic

conflicts,missing data,and duplicates of data compromising the data quality.Besides

maintaining data security and privacy is also a key challenge in implementation of big

data analytics.Big data is faced by high risks of security and privacy as the big data tools

used to analyse it utilizes data from separate sources which increases chances of data

exposure.Other challenges faced in implementantion of data analytics include,difficulties

in analysisng data from different sources,difficulties in accessing inaccessible data,poor

quality of data,pressure from the top management,lack of management support,anxiety

for switching from traditional data analytics tools,budget approval challenges and

shortage of data analytics skills in the organization.

6. Big data analytics enables most business organizations to identify and harness new

business opportunities, thus solving the problem of lack of market for their products and

thus increasing their returns. The use of big data analytics has also enabled most

businesses to acquire new customers and retain their old customers thus enabling them
survive from lose of customers to their competitors as they can track customer behavior

and know when they might be at the risk of leaving to a competitor business. Further

bigdata analytics helps solve the problem of slow decision-making process as business

intelligent tools like data visualizations can help managers interpret large data sets very

first thus improving the speed and the quality of decisions being made. Low productivity

is also reduced when businesses adopt bigdata analytics. Low sales can also be solved by

use of bigdata analytics to boost the sales.Financial efficiency which was a key problem

has been solved by use of big data analytics to ensure steady cash flow and capital in the

business.Other key problems big data analytics is helping solve in businesses

include;sinking revenues,fraud reporting,unexpected risk,poor key performance

indicators management,low employee performance and plummeting marketing returns.

10. Streaming analytics is a principle of analyzing large in motion data streams reffered to as

event streams. It differs with the regular analytics as traditional data analytics deals with

data stored in databases, files, and others where one has to query it to find the results, but

in streaming analytics data is not stored and the query is done on continuous flowing

data. Additionally streaming analytics is used for data sent in small sizes majorly

kilobytes as opposed to the regular data analytics which processes large volumes of data

at the same time. Although it can handle large data sources it is not time sensitive and

thus time sensitive data is streamed to avoid data becoming stale. Also streaming

analytics offers real time results that is provides as opposed to the regular analytics which

has no capability to offer real time results.


12. I believe stream analytics will have more use compared to regular analytics in the era of

big data analytics. This is because of its ability to offer real time results and the fact that

it can handle large amounts of motion data. Besides it is also time sensitive thus its

application may increase in the big data analytics era as data efficiency accuracy and

speed a key in big data analytics.

Application Case 9.7 Using social media for Nowcasting Flu Activity

1. Social media can serve as a early predictor of flu outbreaks because it can supplement

the existing surveillance systems to track flu related traffic on social media as results

indicated that its closely related to the actual flu outbreak.

2. Medical records may be used to help in predicting such outbreaks, as digital

surveillance systems have shown promise in their capacity to discover public health-

seeking patterns and transform these discoveries into actionable strategies to be used

by health officials and governments to develop more accurate and timely forecasting

models during outbreaks and to inform individuals about the locations that they

should avoid during that time period.

3. The problem of disease outbreaks would be a good problem to solve using big data

technologies as the new data analytics techniques and technologies are capable of

detecting, tracking, mapping, and managing such diseases. For instance, the digital

surveillance systems have shown promise in their capacity to discover public health-

seeking patterns and transforming the discoveries into actionable strategies that can

help predict disease outbreaks (Corsi et al.,2021).


References

Corsi, A., de Souza, F. F., Pagani, R. N., & Kovaleski, J. L. (2021). Big data analytics as a tool

for fighting pandemics: a systematic review of literature. Journal of ambient intelligence and

humanized computing, 12(10), 9163-9180.

Sun, Z., & Huo, Y. (2021). The spectrum of big data analytics. Journal of Computer Information

Systems, 61(2), 154-162.

Naeem, M., Jamal, T., Diaz-Martinez, J., Butt, S. A., Montesano, N., Tariq, M. I., ... & De-La-

Hoz-Valdiris, E. (2022). Trends and future perspective challenges in big data. In Advances in

intelligent data analysis and applications (pp. 309-325). Springer, Singapore.

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