BIG DATA
AND ANALYTICS
From Sensory Overload
THE BIG DATA CHALLENGE OR OPPORTUNITY
Companies have long focused on how to better serve their customers and increase profitability. These goals are now more acute than ever before:
• Customer expectations are increasing rapidly — expectations that you will know what they want, when and how they want it
• Expectations of your stakeholders place continual pressure on profitability • Regulatory requirements and new forms of competition are increasing
The opportunity presented by big data is leading your customers to expect more, making government organizations expect greater transparency, increasing expectations for ever more profitable operations, and enabling organizations that were never on your radar to suddenly become your competition.
The challenge for organizations today is to get ahead of this opportunity and capitalize on their ability to monetize big data. The information is there, available inside and outside your organization to help you compete and operate in new ways — if only you can connect the dots.
Your customers are sending 98,000 tweets per minute and posting 30 billion pieces of content daily on Facebook. This content is unstructured: It comes in the form of text, videos, pictures and audio. They’re talking about what they like and, more importantly, what they don’t like. A single Boeing aircraft engine can generate 20 terabytes of data every hour. Stock market prices are changing in fractions of seconds, and missed opportunities can cost traders millions of dollars. In all this noise, what do you need to pay attention to? What can you ignore?
THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE
Advances in technology are finally making it possible to find the signal in the noise. Advances in data management enable you to leverage real-time, streaming data. They allow you to manage massive amounts of data — structured and unstructured — and data that is far from perfect.
Advances in analytic capabilities enable you to predict outcomes, not just analyze the past. To embed insights right into your business processes at the point of impact. To embed optimization techniques into machinery. To identify anomalies that could represent fraud or an imminent system failure.
The falling cost of infrastructure puts these technologies within reach today — making parallel processing, real-time computing and mobility tools accessible to all. Bringing these technologies together is what will create competitive advantage for you. Technologies to ingest a variety and velocity of data, bringing it into a form that lets you determine what you need and what you don’t.
Analyzing that data to understand the past, predict outcomes and identify outliers creates insights and allows you to interpret those insights. Whether it’s machine-to-machine communication to optimize a system, an executive-level dashboard communicating key performance indicators (KPIs), or a communication sent via
In today’s “data-to-data” world, breakthroughs occur when different types of information intersect: structured and unstructured; internal to an organization or external. Figure 1 shows some of these intersections. Combining different data types like machine and supply chain data enables you to do more than advanced KPI reporting. It can help affect business outcomes, for example, anticipating peak periods — enabling you to process faster, reduce downtime or better manage energy consumption.
In customer intelligence, combining customer relationship management (CRM) data with social media data offers companies a 360-degree view of their customers, revealing insights that present unique cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and make new customer retention strategies possible.
The same thing applies when we can provide better care or adhere to regulatory requirements by combining public and provider data (e.g., life sciences data and clinical trial data) to refine diagnoses and treatment protocols.
However, advances in these technologies bring new expectations and challenges. End users want to have the ability to submit more complex queries using both structured and unstructured data. Yet, there is a universal lack of skills to meet these expectations for data science, big data infrastructure, and big data application development. Compounding the pressures is an increasing focus on accelerating time to value.
S
tr
uc
tured Data Private
Internal data
Social media
Cross-sell/ up-sell
Public health data
Provider data Refined diagnosis Public Shared Machine data Supply chain Optimized operations U n struct ured Data
A NEW WAY FORWARD
Getting to these breakthroughs requires a roadmap to get from where you are today to where you want to be — and identifying the enablers that will get you there. Business intelligence (BI) was a starting point, but to compete today, you need a big data strategy. Instead of reporting on the purchases your customers have made, you can combine new data sources to predict how your customers will react when presented with various cross-sell or up-sell offers.
With that in mind, let’s take a minute to reflect: What information, if you had it, would transform the way you do business? Improve your customer experience? Help you meet regulatory requirements more effectively? Enable you to be more profitable or innovate more?
CSC provides a foundation of information management and analytic capabilities that deliver insights about the past, present and future. And we can help you start delivering business insights in fewer than 30 days. We are helping organizations capitalize on big data to improve their operations and compete more effectively:
• By enabling the Avis Budget Group to better understand the lifetime value of its customers, CSC helped the company improve campaign targeting, resulting in $200 million of incremental revenue. While the outcomes and business drivers are different, the approach to segmenting your customer base, applying different treatment strategies, accepting the idea that you may lose some unprofitable customers — these concepts translate to almost any industry.
• CSC helped the Belgian Federal Public Service Social Security to develop a common data warehouse platform for fraud detection in the social security domain. CSC also successfully worked with the government agency to enhance its performance management program. This delivered the first enterprise-wide application for all agency services.
• HGST, a Western Digital company, was challenged with short project timelines, disparate data source integration, little in-house expertise and massive data volumes. Infochimps, a CSC company, helped HGST by deploying its Big Data Cloud with a sophisticated machine data analytics engine. Based on open source from Web-scale companies like Google, the offering provides highly scalable infrastructure with simple interfaces for adding new data elements and deploying new data analytics. It offers minimal operation burden (as a fully managed service), a fast development timeline, and an agile, flexible infrastructure for effectively turning data into revenue.
• Volkswagen Group France is using big data to increase aftermarket service revenues and build brand loyalty. Working with CSC, Volkswagen developed a campaign management solution combining customer data with vehicle data to entice Volkswagen owners to come to its service centers. As a result, the company was able to use targeted communications to specific drivers about upcoming maintenance needs, enhancing customer loyalty.
When we look at influencing and predicting outcomes, CSC’s capabilities stand out from those of our competitors. We stand out because we don’t stop at the ability to ingest information, manage information, and analyze it. We build repeatable capabilities at the level of functional intelligence, such as customer intelligence, operational intelligence or financial intelligence, and then specialize those functional capabilities into industry-specific solutions.
Big data solutions are different from traditional BI implementations. With BI, the steps to follow are often well defined. With big data, experimentation is often needed to identify the most important pieces of data, see what correlations can be drawn, and understand how to translate that information into opportunity and new insights. After we do an analysis, we may enter an iterative analysis stage, using your data to identify opportunities or gain new insights about a particular business problem. This step can both quickly validate the approach and identify significant new opportunities, creating additional momentum and acceptance.
OUR OFFERING PORTFOLIO
We’ve packaged our industry and business process expertise to help you realize value from these new opportunities — fast. Our accelerators are an important differentiator. Our roadmaps, blueprints, reference architectures, prebuilt components, etc., will accelerate benefit realization and time to value. We’ve made investments in emerging open source technologies that will ensure we can stand up a big data infrastructure and deliver business insights in fewer than 30 days.
Another point of differentiation is that we’re independent — not tied to a particular hardware or software provider. To enable this technology independence, we cultivate key alliances with the open source community, up-and-comers and other technology leaders including EMC, SAP, IBM and Oracle, to name a few. Furthering our commitment to open source, CSC has also made strategic acquisitions, such as 42Six Solutions in 2012 and Infochimps in 2013. CSC applies best-of-breed technologies to the right data sets using the right analytical techniques to deliver faster time to value for better business results.
For more than 50 years, CSC has served clients around the world in many industries. We understand the unique business needs of each industry. When you combine our vertical knowledge, the industrialized offerings, data services, and the fact that we can implement on any of the most effective platforms, providing full-service end-to-end services, CSC is the firm of choice.
Finally, those insights need to be embedded where action can be taken. When your frontline has the guidance they need at their fingertips, they can have a direct impact on the outcomes you’re driving toward.
It’s an iterative approach — you’ve only just started …
Avoid costly mistakes with attention to architecture Imagine the potential from disparate data sources Present the output in an easily assimilated and visualized form Start from the business need/opportunity Operationalize the resulting insights Contribute CSC’s industry understanding to create advanced analytic models
6.
Ac
tion
3. Ana
lyti
c M
od
el
s
4. A
rch
itect
ure
5.
V
is
ua
liz
at
io
n
1. Busin
ess N
ee
d
2.
D
at
a S
ou
rc
es
Through experience
with many projects,
we’ve learned what
it takes to succeed.
FIGURE 2. KEY FACTORS FOR A SUCCESSFUL BIG DATA STRATEGY
Asia, Middle East, Africa 20 Anson Road #11-01 Twenty Anson Singapore 079912 Republic of Singapore +65.6221.9095 Australia 26 Talavera Road Macquarie Park, NSW 2113 Australia +61(2)9034.3000
Central and Eastern Europe
Abraham-Lincoln-Park 1 65189 Wiesbaden Germany
+49.611.1420
Nordic and Baltic Region
Retortvej 8 DK-2500 Valby Denmark +45.36.14.4000
South and West Europe
Immeuble Balzac 10 place des Vosges
92072 Paris la Défense Cedex France
