Five Ideas: Solving the Data Puzzle

With digital data expected to increase globally by 4,300 percent by 2020, competitive pressure is mounting. Will you be able to manage all that information – and glean insights that drive your business forward?

This month, you can sign up for Oracle’s Webcast, Mining Social Data for Insights, to learn from social media analysts about which data matters most, and how to use it across functions to uncover new opportunities for your business.

Here, learn from data experts – including Oracle’s own thought leaders – who have recently spoken to Profit magazine about finding opportunities, the importance of modern technology, and how to avoid pitfalls that can damage your business.

“A 2013 survey by the big data firm Infochimps indicated that over 55 percent of big data projects are not completed, and many more fail to meet their objectives. Given that over 81 percent of the companies in the same survey included big data projects in their top five IT priorities for 2013, the failure percentage is significant.” —Subramanian Iyer, senior director of Insight and Customer Strategy at Oracle

“Most people have been very focused on internal data, but often there are opportunities to say, ‘How can we do a better job of improving our decisions or our products by augmenting all that internal data with some external data?’ Can you scrape something from the Internet? Can you look at social media? Can you put a sensor in your product to collect some data about it?” —Thomas H. Davenport, author of Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities

“Alongside…challenges, this digital revolution is also providing unprecedented opportunities to improve the overall customer experience via big data analytics. This is the process of collating and interpreting these vast quantities of data to extract the meaningful, insightful, and useful data that provides value to a customer.” —Michael Abramow, director of Strategy and Insight, Japan and Asia Pacific at Oracle

“It’s critical that we have a hardware platform that can manage our superfast, real-time transactions quickly for analysis because the older the data is, the less value it has.” —Tim Pitzer, senior vice president, Theatrical Worldwide IT & Operations at Rentrak

“Intelligent use of data is the future in healthcare, because healthcare reform in the United States is causing a shift from fee-for-service-based models to value-based models.” —John Lewis, director of Insight and Customer Strategy at Oracle