Chapter 9 Questions and Case Study
Chapter 9 Questions and Case Study
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
noted that roughly 95% of big data is unstructured and thus cannot easily fit into a
Big data is very important as it is used by many companies in all business fields to
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
Big data comes from many different sources such as mobile apps, social networks,
customer data bases, medical records, documents, clickstream logs in the internet ,
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
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
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
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
compound it all,big data analytics is majorly used where there is complex data sets and
opportunities and customer personalization.On the other hand regular analytics are used
4. The critical success factors for big data analytics are fundamental when implementing
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
key,as how successful the bigdata nalytics is implemented depends on the skills of the
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
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
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
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
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
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
for switching from traditional data analytics tools,budget approval challenges and
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
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
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
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
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
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
Corsi, A., de Souza, F. F., Pagani, R. N., & Kovaleski, J. L. (2021). Big data analytics as a tool
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