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Hardeep Chahal · Jeevan Jyoti
Jochen Wirtz Editors
Understanding
the Role of
Business
Analytics
Some Applications
Understanding the Role of Business Analytics
Hardeep Chahal Jeevan Jyoti Jochen Wirtz
• •
Editors
123
Editors
Hardeep Chahal Jochen Wirtz
Department of Commerce Department of Marketing
University of Jammu National University of Singapore
Jammu, India Singapore, Singapore
Jeevan Jyoti
Department of Commerce
University of Jammu
Jammu, India
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721,
Singapore
Foreword
v
Preface
vii
viii Preface
This edited book is a collection of ten chapters covering diverse data analytics
topics including a conceptual chapter on big data (Chap. 2) and eleven empirical
chapters on various functional areas like finance (Chaps. 3–6), marketing (Chaps. 7
–8), and HR/OB (Chaps. 9–10). The contributors have used basic techniques like
correlation, forecasting, and trend analysis and advanced higher order modelling
techniques like a gravity model and a panel data quantile-regression, structural
equation modelling, mediation analysis, moderation analysis etc. These chapters are
going to be very useful to the researchers and practitioners in the application of
analytical tools and techniques for better strategic decision-making.
We acknowledge all those people who were involved and helped in completing this
project. At the outset, we would like to thank the authors who have contributed to
this book in terms of their time and expertise. We also wish to acknowledge the
valuable contributions of the reviewers regarding the improvement of quality,
coherence, and content presentation of chapters. We also appreciate the referees for
reviewing the chapters, and scholars for editing and organizing the chapters.
Hardeep Chahal
Jeevan Jyoti
Jochen Wirtz
ix
Contents
xi
xii Contents
xiii
xiv Editors and Contributors
Contributors
Abstract The word business analytics has become a buzzword in the present era of
experience economy. Primarily, the proliferation of the Internet and information
technology has made business analytics a robust application area. On the other
hand, it is equally impossible to deny its significant impact on the fields of infor-
mation technology, quantitative methods and the decision sciences (Cegielski and
Jones-Farmer 2016). Both industry and academia seek to hire talent in these areas
with the hope of developing organizational competencies to sustain competitive
advantage. Hopkins et al. (2007) and Hair et al. (2003) assert that adequate
knowledge on business analytics techniques enables the analysts—practitioners,
managers, etc—with capabilities that enable them to take quick and smart decisions
and provide stable leadership to the organization to compete in the market effec-
tively. On the other hand, it provides a platform for the researchers and academi-
cians to lay down path for the theory development. However, Hawley (2016)
pointed that business analytics focuses more on understanding the organizational
culture than mere technology. Thus, for successful implementation and harnessing
the benefits of business analytics the knowledge of an organization’s motivation,
strengths and weaknesses is necessary (Hawley 2016).
Keywords Business analytics Decision making Statistical techniques
Quantitative analysis Business applications
1.1 Introduction
The word business analytics has become a buzzword in the present era of experi-
ence economy. Primarily, the proliferation of the Internet and information tech-
nology has made business analytics a robust application area. On the other hand, it
is equally impossible to deny its significant impact on the fields of information
technology, quantitative methods and the decision sciences (Cegielski and
Jones-Farmer 2016). Both industry and academia seek to hire talent in these areas
with the hope of developing organizational competencies to sustain competitive
advantage. Hopkins et al. (2007) and Hair et al. (2003) assert that adequate
knowledge on business analytics techniques enables the analysts—practitioners,
managers etc—with capabilities that enable them to take quick and smart decisions
and provide stable leadership to the organization to compete in the market effec-
tively. On the other hand, it provides a platform for the researchers and academi-
cians to lay down path for the theory development. However, Hawley (2016)
pointed that business analytics focuses more on understanding the organizational
culture than mere technology. Thus, for successful implementation and harnessing
the benefits of business analytics the knowledge of an organization’s motivation,
strengths and weaknesses is necessary (Hawley 2016).
Business analytics comprises techniques and processes, namely statistical anal-
ysis; forecasting; predictive analysis and optimization, which maintain and sustain
business performance (Davenport and Harris 2006; Hopkins et al. 2007). It is
Information Optimisation
Prescri ve Analytics –
How it can happen again?
Predi ve Analy cs –
When it can happen?
Diagnos c Analy cs –
Why it happened?
Business Value
Descriptive Analytics
– What happened?
Information
Level of Analytics
Research, in the last few decades, highlights on the growing need of application of
advanced techniques in the business decision-making for managers (Evermann and
Tate 2016). The role of business analytics has become paramount due to complex
business problems, limited ability to analyse the available solutions and shortage of
time for decision-making (Davenport and Harris 2006). They claim that business
analytical techniques provide managers with more confidence in dealing with
uncertainty in spite of the availability of huge data. Besides, these techniques are of
great interest and utility to behavioural and social scientists also, who continually
struggle with complex phenomenon, to detect pattern buried in complex quantita-
tive data. Hopkins et al. (2007) and Hair et al. (2003) assert that adequate
knowledge on business analytics techniques enables the analysts—practitioners,
managers, etc—with capabilities that enable them to take quick and smart decisions
and provide stable leadership to the organization to compete in the market
effectively. On the other hand, it provides a platform for the researchers and
academicians to lay down path for the theory development.
While highlighting on the significance of the analytical needs, Davenport and
Harris (2006) claimed that most of the high-performance work systems/
organizations have employees with high analytical capabilities. And companies
using such techniques in their decision-making process are in a better position to
compete and sustain competitive advantage. Among the various statistical tech-
niques, structural equation models (SEMs), including confirmatory factor analysis,
help in both theory building and predictive analysis and their role has become more
crucial with the advent of big data. The predictive modelling enables managers and
the researchers to have fresh insights for their future endeavours (Shmueli and
Koppius 2011). Addressing this need, our efforts in this context will fill the extant
gap and will help managers and entrepreneurs in a knowledge-based decision-
making (Hair Jr. et al. 2011).
This edited book is a collection of ten research papers including a conceptual
paper on big data (Chap. 2) and nine empirical papers in the areas of finance
4 H. Chahal et al.
(Chaps. 3–6), marketing (Chaps. 7–9) and HR/OB (Chap. 10) that can help the
researchers and practitioners in the application of analytical tools and techniques for
strategic decision-making.
The second chapter on big data analytics delves upon the underlying tech-
nologies used by organizations for value generation. The author has discussed the
challenges faced by business organizations in monitoring the data that has grown
from terabytes to exabytes and petabytes. Further, the compounded rate of data is
further growing much fast. The deluge of data generated, which is both valuable
and challenging, along with emerging technologies and techniques that are used to
handle it is referred to as the evolution and era of “big data”. She further expressed
that to leverage the large volume of data for driving the business enterprises, timely
and accurate insights derived out of the big data are a big challenge. Further,
handling and analysis of big data are a challenge for all types of organizations with
respect to its storage and technical expertise. The chapter highlights big data
characteristics like volume, value, variety, velocity, veracity and variability and its
analysis through exploratory, confirmatory and qualitative data analyses. Further,
technologies like Hadoop and Apache Spark in handling big data have also been
discussed.
The following section of the chapter discusses in brief the contribution of the
papers in the three functional areas: finance; marketing and HR/OB.
1.3 Finance
Nowadays, macroeconomic models are being used to forecast the future of the
economy. Modern economics and business management are using econometric
applications for extensive training of its personnel. Managers are using econometric
applications for devising optimal economic strategies for better insight, superior
value, optimized solutions and sustain competition. Econometric applications
provide organizations with a potent set of tools to unlock the power of information
for effective decision-making (Kolluru and Mishra 2012). In this context, Huseyni,
Celik and Eren (Chap. 3) used a gravity model approach to analyse the primary
factors that influence Turkey’s vehicle (car, minibus, bus, van and truck) exports to
its major trading partners over the period of 2005–2015. For this purpose, a gravity
model and a panel data quantile regression approaches have been performed by the
bootstrap method for empirical results. The results revealed that the population of
importer country and the amount of per capita income are positively correlated with
the amount of Turkish automotive exports. Additionally, when the distance between
importer country and the capital of Turkey increases, the amount of Turkish
automotive industry exports was more likely to have a decreasing behaviour.
Further, exporting to an EU member country has a statistically significant
increasing impact on the amount of automotive industry exports. The estimation
results also indicated that the real exchange rate was not a statistically significant
determinant of the amount of automotive industry exports during the sample
1 Business Analytics: Concept and Applications 5
period. The authors concluded that Turkey cannot exactly succeed to use the
competitive advantage of the possible declines on real exchange rates due to higher
costs of imports in the automotive industry.
The authors of fourth chapter, Wani, Haque and Raina, empirically proved the
positive correlation of gross domestic product (GDP), inflation, lending interest rate
(LIR) and capital-to-risk weighted assets ratio (CRAR) with the net interest margin
(NIM) in the banking industry. The study established that a favourable macroe-
conomic environment proves to be a main driver for encouraging NIM with a
prudent control over CRAR along with NPLs. The study suggested installing the
latest advances and practices of risk management especially on the credit front,
which will also help the banks to utilize excessive capital rather than accumulating
it unnecessarily.
In fifth chapter, Rangotra analysed the impact of various reforms undertaken by
the Government of India to improve liquidity, transparency and security in the
Indian bond market. It considers reforms initiated by the Government of India since
1992 that include introduction of system of primary dealers, establishment of
Clearing Corporation of Indian Limited as a clearing house, introduction of
screen-based trading in government securities through Negotiated Dealing
System-Order Matching (NDS-OM), trading of bonds through stock exchanges,
introduction of delivery versus payment system. The impact of reforms on the
Indian bond market has been examined by analysing the combined gross borrowing
of centre and state government through government securities (increased by around
8900% from 1991–92 to 2016–17), secondary market transactions in government
securities (increased by around 430,000% from September 1994 to September
2017), net corporate debt outstanding (increased by around 225% from June 2010
to September 2017), total trade in corporate bond market (increased by around
1450% from 2007–08 to 2016–17) and other variables related to the liquidity and
size of Indian bond market. The impact of reforms is found to be positive for all the
dimensions but has a significant impact only on the size and liquidity of the Indian
bond market. Mor, Jaiswal, Singh and Bhardwaj (Chap. 6) have focused on demand
forecasting of the short lifecycle dairy products. They have compared the perfor-
mances between different forecasting models for the prediction of group of dairy
products. Authors compared the moving average, regression, multiple regression
and Holt-Winters models based on MAPE, MAD, MSE and RMSE for the demand
forecasting of a time series formed by a group of dairy products.
1.4 Marketing
Understanding organization and its people have gained immense attention in the
present business scenario due to the value attached to human aspects for providing
sustainable competitive advantage. Human resources are rare, valuable and cannot
be copied or substituted (Barney 1991). These have immense creative capabilities to
upgrade the innovative domain of an organization. Though cultural diversity results
in knowledge sharing at various platforms in the organization, it also has adjust-
ment issues. In this context, Kour, Jyoti and Pereira (Chap. 9) have evaluated the
role of cultural adjustment (CCA) and work experience between cultural intelli-
gence (CQ) and knowledge sharing relationship in the banking sector. Structural
model explains the indirect effect of CQ on knowledge sharing with cross-cultural
adjustment as mediator. Further, the role played by language proficiency and work
experience has also been evaluated. The result revealed that CCA mediates the
combined effect of CQ and work experience on knowledge sharing. The study
contributes towards cultural intelligence theory. It helps in understanding the
complex relationships in organizational setup, which can be of immense use for the
practitioners at the workplace. The last chapter by Kumar, Singh and Rana analyses
the impact of employer branding on organizational attractiveness in Indian orga-
nizations using factor analysis, Pearson‘s r and step-wise multiple regression
analysis techniques. The results indicate that employer branding has a positive and
significant relationship with organizational attractiveness. Since economic value,
application value, social value and development value emerged as strong predictors
of attracting and retaining employees, employers can provide employees with
marketable skills through training and development in return for effort and flexi-
bility. The authors believed that the study findings can help in identifying varied
EBs aspects that are effective in extracting organizational attractiveness and
incorporating them into the organizational culture.
There is significant evidence that the ability to make better decisions improves
with the usage of quantitative-, qualitative- and financial-based techniques. Hence,
this book offers a relevant resource that can help the audience (research scholars,
practitioners, market researchers, etc.) in the application and interpretation of sta-
tistical practices, using real-world applications from the fields of marketing, human
resources, finance, operations research and information technology relating to
issues like preferences of a customer base, quality of manufactured products, high-
performance human resource policy, employee resilience, availability of financial
resources, operational flexibility, etc.
8 H. Chahal et al.
References
Barney, J. (1991). Firm resources and competitive advantage. Journal of Management, 17(1),
99–120.
Cegielski, C. G., & Jones-Farmer, L. A. (2016). Knowledge, skills, and abilities for entry-level
business analytics positions: A multi-method study. Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative
Education, 4(1), 91–118.
Chen, H., Chiang, R. H., & Storey, V. C. (2012). Business intelligence and analytics: From big
data to big impact. MIS Quarterly, 36(4), 1165–1188.
Davenport, T. H., & Harris, J. G. (2006). Competing on analytics: The new science of winning.
Boston, MA: Harward Business School Press.
Evermann, J., & Tate, M. (2016). Assessing the predictive performance of structural equation
model estimators. Journal of Business Research, 69, 4565–4582.
Hair, J. F., Bush, R. P., & Ortinau, D. J. (2003). Marketing research: Within a changing
information environment (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill/ Irwin.
Hair, J. F., Jr., Wolfinbarger, M., Money, A. H., Samouel, P., & Page, M. J. (2011). Essentials of
Business Research Methods. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.
Hawley, D. (2016). Implementing business analytics within the supply chain: success. The
Electronic Journal Information Systems Evaluation, 19(2), 112–120.
Hopkins, M. S., LaValle, S., Balboni, F., Kruschwitz, N., & Shockley, R. (2007). 10 insights: A
first look at the new intelligence enterprise survey on winning with data. MIT Sloan
Management Review, 52(1), 21–31.
Kolluru, S., & Mishra, R. K., (2012). Econometric Applications for Managers. New Delhi: Allied
Publisher.
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analytics-for-marketing-professionals: http://www.proschoolonline.com/blog/business-analytics-
for-marketing-professionals/.
Shmueli, G., & Koppius, O. R. (2011). Predictive analytics in information system. MIS Quarterly,
35(3), 553–572.
Chapter 2
Big Data Analytics: The Underlying
Technologies Used by Organizations
for Value Generation
Bhavna Arora
Abstract The expansion of Internet and its applications globally has witnessed
generation of high volume of data resulting in high volume of information. In the
contemporary era of digital world, data is seen as the driving force behind the
progression of business enterprises. Today, the data that is generated worldwide has
grown ranging from terabytes to exabytes and petabytes, and the compounded rate
of data further growing is much fast. The data generated widely has many forms
and structures. The deluge of data generated, which is both valuable and chal-
lenging, along with emerging technologies and techniques that are used to handle it
is referred to as the evolution and era of “Big Data”. As the big data is generated
from multitudinous sources, majority of this data exists in unstructured form that
demands specialized processing and storage capabilities, unlike the structured data
that uses storage and processing of traditional relational structures. This results in
high complexity and uncertainty in data. The usage of statistical analysis,
computer-based models and quantitative methods that can help the business orga-
nizations to improve insights for better operations and decision-making is referred
as business analytics. To work intelligently and focus on value generation, orga-
nizations need to focus on business analytics. The analytics are a critical component
of big data computing. As defined in the literature, an intelligent enterprise has the
characteristics similar to human nervous system and is responsive to external
stimuli. To leverage the large volume of data for driving the business enterprises,
timely and accurate insights derived out of the big data are a big challenge. The
technologies like Hadoop and Apache Spark assist in handling big data on both
fronts. However, handling and analysis of big data are a challenge for any orga-
nization with respect to its storage and technical expertise. Business analytics is
used in business organizations for value generation by data manipulation along with
business intelligence and report generation. Advanced analytics are also used by
business enterprises that use techniques of data mining, data optimization and
predictive forecasting.
B. Arora (&)
Department of Computer Science & IT, Central University of Jammu, Jammu, J&K, India
e-mail: [email protected]
The contemporary era has witnessed very large volumes of data and the termi-
nology and trends that have been accepted globally with these are “Big Data”. The
author in paper (“What Is Big Data?—Gartner IT Glossary—Big Data”, n.d.) has
defined big data as “Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety
information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information
processing for enhanced insight and decision-making”.
In Manyika et al. (2011), the author refers “Big Data” to “data set whose size is
beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage and
analyse”.
The volume of data that is being stored today around the world is exploding. In
the year 2000, the world witnessed storage of 8 lac petabytes of data. With the
expansion of Web and its applications, the data that is being stored is growing
exponentially. The data is likely to rise to 35 zettabytes by the year 2020. The data
that is created is not analysed efficiently, and the insights of the data is not revealed.
The data contains hidden insights that the companies can use to enhance their
business perspectives. How the volume of big data impacts the human mind is very
challenging. Considering the data volume that consists of multiples of terabytes
may be considered as big data, but actually when it can be managed in network
attached storages (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) using additional disc
arrays, then it might not be considered as really Big Data. When the data exceeds
this limit, i.e. about petabytes in size and can only be managed with sophisticated
applications and tools, the data can be referred as “Big Data”. This would require a
complex distributed computing and storage grids extensively, so that this data could
be managed.
However, companies used various tools and technologies to collect and store
different types of big data. The analysis of these diversities of big data is chal-
lenging as the tools that are required for big data analysis are extremely complex to
design and implement. The management of this data is another big challenge as the
companies should have the clarity on big data adoptions. It is paramount in agreeing
that such information in big data which is huge and complex has created various
challenges for organizations that did not exist earlier. The large volumes of data
available pose several problems for researchers, analysts and decision-makers in the
industry. At times, the decision-makers in the organization tend to make their
decisions without having complete facts, and others find the business intelligence
along with the data analytics to be part of their visionary plans so as to enhance
business competitiveness.
The evolution of big data has witnessed the explosive growth in the entire
world’s data that can be used to make decisions, but this can only be useful if this
2 Big Data Analytics … 11
can be made in timely manner. For this, powerful tools are needed that can assist in
storage, extraction and analysing the data from the big data sets. The big data can
also be defined as that data that cannot be processed through conventional methods
of processing. To mention few varieties and sources of data that come under the big
data realm are as follows (Jain 2015):
1. Black box data captures the voice and recordings of flight crew members of
helicopter and other aircraft along with the information pertaining to the per-
formance of the aircraft.
2. Data of stock holdings where the decisions made by a customer on a share or
equity of different companies.
3. Data from social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter that holds views
and other information posted by millions of users across the globe.
4. Transport and meteorological data sources.
5. Data retrieved by search engines from different databases.
6. Metamorphic and Census data.
7. Connection-oriented data that includes sensory data.
8. Data from cloud storages that provides computing and data on demand.
Big data is more than just more information; it represents the beginning of the
end of the industry experience as a core competitive advantage (Stubbs 2014). Big
data is not a philosophical fancy anymore. It is already in place in industry. Big data
cannot be argued as just the latest version of “data”. Today, the users are generating
much more data and more types of data than before. In their work, Manyika et al.
(2011) have proposed five major contributions that big data contributes to business
organizations:
• transparency creation by making big data more accessible and ready to use in
timely manner for value generation
• performance improvement by enabling experimentation
• population segmentation by tailoring products and services that meet specific
needs
• decision-making support
• innovative business models, products and services
Big data and business analytics work hand in glove. Without data, analysis
cannot be done. Without business analytics, big data is just noise. Big data bears the
potential of making things efficient and is capable of generating returns. These
returns include benefits to internal value such as productivity or external value like
revenue generation. It offers exceptional insights along with predictive capabilities
for those who are able to leverage it.
12 B. Arora
2.2.1 Volume
2.2.2 Variety
The traditional systems heavily rely on underlying structured data whose dimensions are
considered as accuracy, completeness, relevance and timeliness. The inputs to such
systems need to be entered judiciously and meticulously so that the output that is
produced in the form of reports is meaningful and useful. The big data is heterogeneous.
In such environments, the system needs to use techniques for data cleaning so as to
eliminate the garbage data in source. Data collected from various sources like applica-
tions, stock data, emails, geographical data, weather data, social media application data is
difficult to handle as it comes from a variety of sources, and it is virtually impossible to
convert this heterogeneous data to a conventional structured form for processing. In
order to process such data, special techniques and technologies are used that can
understand and go beyond the traditional processing of the relational structured data. Big
data solutions need different types of processing tools to process heterogeneous data.
2.2.3 Velocity
The rate at which the data flows in the system and its environment is termed as
velocity. With the Internet and mobile data coming in the lives of the consumer, the
era witnesses high rate of data flow as the consumers carry with their devices, a huge
volume of streaming source of data that consist of geo-located images and audios.
Studies reveal that in the year 2013, about five exabyte data were generated in the
world every 10 min. Today, this figure has risen exponentially risen, and the data is
being generated every minute. However, the importance of velocity of big data
follows the similar rate of increase as in the case of volume of the data. For example,
the business Walmart creates about 2.5 petabytes per hour (Brock and Khan 2017).
One of the main challenges to the velocity is the communication networks. Since the
big data processing demands real-time processing, the processing capabilities for
inflow of the data streams in the networks are also a big challenge.
2.2.4 Veracity
The reliability and trustworthiness of data are termed as veracity of data. It also
refers to the quality of the data. The point to focus on is “how accurate is all this
data?” As an example, consider the tweets in Twitter posts. These posts contain
hashtags, typos, abbreviations, etc. The data that is to be considered should be
reliable, accurate and trustworthy. Manipulation and analysis of such data need to
be qualitative and trustworthy to get correct insights from it. For real-time appli-
cations, to provide correct and reliable data at times the applications may produce
nearest best results in the cases where the data that is being analysed in real-time
applications fails to deliver in a particular moment.
14 B. Arora
2.2.5 Value
Value refers to the worthiness of the data being extracted. On one hand, if the
organization has voluminous amount of data but unless it can be made useful for the
organization, it is worthless. Even though there is an explicit association between
data and insights, it does not definitely mean that there is value in big data. The
original data received might have low value as compared to its volume. By ana-
lysing a large volume of data appropriately, high value and pronounced insights
from the data can be obtained. The significance of embarking on initiatives of big
data is to understand the costs of analysing and reaping the benefits during the
process of collecting and analysing data. Thus, it ensures that the data that is reaped
is monetized and the organization is benefitted to the maximum.
2.2.6 Variability
The variation in the flow rates of data is referred to as variability of data. The
velocity of big data is inconsistent and has periodic troughs and peaks. As the big
data is generated from myriad resources, complexity also has to be analysed.
Complexity arises after collecting data from different sources as it has to connect,
clean, match and transform the data (Fig. 2.1).
As the data sources of big data are numerous, based on the types of data, big data
can be classified broadly into three categories—unstructured, semi-structured and
structured.
The data that is stored in the databases in an orderly manner is referred to as the
structured data. Statistics reveal that structured data only constitutes about
Value
Volume
Veracity
Variability
Variety
2 Big Data Analytics … 15
Sales
Inventory
Metadata
Summary
data
Raw Data
Marketing
Data Marts
one-fourth of the data that the organizations use. This data can be used in pro-
gramming and querying structures from databases. The sources of such data can be
from machine input or humans. Data that is generated by machines includes data
from GPS-like devices or sensory devices like the medical equipment, Web
interfaces and logs. Data that is included by human systems includes database
records which involve human intervention in generating data. The two most popular
approaches that can be used to manage large data sets in a structured way are data
warehouses and its subsets, i.e. data marts. A data warehouse can be seen as an
assemblage of data which is isolated from the operational systems and the
decision-making process in any organization. It is a huge repository of historic data.
The data is compiled and assembled from various resources so as to provide timely
and accurate information. The data in a data warehouse is the extracted information
from various functional units of an organization. Before the data is integrated into
the warehouse, it undergoes a series of processes. These preprocesses are data
cleaning, data transformation and data cataloguing. After the preprocessing, the
data is available for higher-level online data mining functions. These warehouses
are controlled by a centralized unit. The subset of data warehouse is a data mart.
The data marts focus on specific functional area only. The warehouse and data mart
both primarily vary in their scope and usage area. The structured data forms only a
small subset of the Big data that is ready for analysis (Fig. 2.2).
Unlike the traditional row–column database structure, the unstructured data has no
clear formats in storage. Such data constitutes about 80% of the total data that is
included in big data. Till few years back, such data has been stored and analysed
manually as it was quite difficult to analyse this data. The unstructured data can
16 B. Arora
A very thin line exists between the unstructured and semi-structured data. Unless
clearly defined, the semi-structured data can appear as unstructured. Even though
that the information is not typically arranged in traditional database structured
formats, but in order to process this data, some properties that make the data
processing easier and convenient to process are contained in it.
Technically speaking, in order to gain insights from big data, right technology for
various processes like collecting, managing and analysing is required. The pre-
dictive purpose for the same is quite critical. Since the data is from a variety of
sources and is of different types, there is a requirement of different computing
platforms that support in providing meaningful insights. In order to determine the
technology and processes that are required to glean the insights from the big data, it
is imperative to understand the difference between data at rest and data in motion.
In data handling systems, data at rest refers to data that is stored in stable systems.
The data at rest comprises data compiled and stored in structures like spreadsheets,
databases, warehouses, archives and backups, mobile data. There can be different
points where data is analysed and where its action is taken. This can occur at two
separate times. For example, present month’s business activities can be predicted
based on last month’s sales data by a retailer. The action is making strategic
decisions, and the activity is the sales of the previous month. Market campaigns and
strategies can be planned accordingly based on the variables like customer beha-
viour, sale schemes. Looking at this data analysis, the business can take advantage
and such decisions can impact the sales in the stores, while the customer would be
benefitted with the sale schemes the store offers.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
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