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 mobile device to delivery personnel updating them on a change of route, the interpretation drives action by people and processes to take the steps needed toward the optimal outcome. 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.
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?
Big data solutions can be applied across roles and decision points in an organization. It’s not a problem that’s left to IT, but rather can be embraced by marketing, sales, customer service, product development, doctors, claims specialists, and so on. Big data solutions can be embedded in machine processes to enable real-time optimization.
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Private
Internal data
Social media
Cross-sell/ up-sell
Public health data
Provider data Refined diagnosis
Public
Shared
Machine data Supply chain Optimized operationsU
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Big data lets you go beyond traditional customer segmentation to answer the question: “How do I increase my customer base without taking on too much risk?” It lets you go beyond capturing data for regulatory reporting to new business models to capitalize on your new data assets.
CSC provides a foundation of information management and analytic capabilities that deliver insights about the past, present and future. 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.
• 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.
Another point of differentiation is that we’re independent — not tied to a particular hardware or software provider. Instead, we maintain preferred relationships with leading technology vendors. By aligning with the largest players and some of the emerging players, we are able to guide you toward best-of-breed solutions. We offer industry solutions tuned to specific outcomes and built on strategic partner platforms, including EMC, SAP, IBM and Oracle, to name a few. These relationships mitigate the risk of the project and underscore our global delivery model and ability to implement regardless of platform.
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.
Through our experience with many projects, we’ve determined the key factors for success, shown in Figure 2. First, you have to start with your business need. Then you need to determine what outcome you are trying to effect. Pulling together disparate data sources, we apply various analytic techniques to draw out the insights that can substantially change the outcome at hand. Then the insights are output in a usable manner, either by a person or process, so visualization and integration become critical.
Figure 2. Key Factors for a Successful Big Data Strategy
In summary, our industry expertise, repeatable solutions, technology independence, and full-service approach, together with our clients’ business and IT expertise, enable our clients to drive better outcomes through new insights. These strengths, combined with our vertical expertise, accelerators and partner relationships, make CSC the right partner for you in your big data journey.
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
About CSC
CSC is a global leader in next-generation IT services and solutions. The company’s mission is to enable superior returns on our clients’ technology investments through best-in-class industry solutions, domain expertise and global scale. For more information, visit us at www.csc.com.
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