Chapter 2. Creating an Opportunity Landscape and Collecting Your Gold Coins

In the previous chapter, we worked on identifying parts of your business where we can unlock untapped value by applying big data analytics and integrating its possibilities into your strategic framework. Now, let's work on identifying what specific opportunities to pursue. Big data should not be seen as panacea for all organizational pursuits. There are certain scenarios where big data capabilities can help organizations understand problems or opportunities and make decisions. In this chapter, we will work on identifying these scenarios. Happy hunting!

Let's first review the major changes that are enabled by big data. In their distinguished book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, Prof. Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Mr. Kenneth Cukier talk about 3 major changes:

• The ability to process all or vast amounts of data. This is important because now you are no longer limited by sample sizes...

Building your Data Catalog

In Chapter 1, Building Your Strategy Framework, we worked on building a Business Catalog and a related Information Catalog. These are your starting points to build your Data Catalog. For each of the identified revenue sources or business or operations areas, you already have a list of various information topics that you currently have or can get access to. Now for each of these information topics, you need to list the detailed data elements, including both what you have and what you need to fully understand the topic and generate value from it. For doing this exercise, you will need help from your IT experts who are responsible for the maintenance of data-related systems, as well as from users of those systems who actually understand the data can provide some kind of context for it. Sometimes it is good to get the viewpoint of employees who are not connected to the different IT systems, but have a deep understanding of the business in terms of what information...

The Gold Coin approach

Gold Coin is a contained project that leverages the power of advanced analytics to create tangible value from data that may not have been tapped previously. A Gold Coin is usually an easily manageable sized project that has small but measurable value that grows over a period of time. The growth in economic value of a Gold Coin happens because of the higher appreciation of the benefits of the outcome from the project and/or greater adoption across your business. I was first introduced to the concept of Gold Coins by Mr. Howard is currently Senior Vice President of Innovation and Development at Allstate Insurance in US. Howard has spent decades in his career across various companies and industries identifying these small nuggets of value from data and analytics while striving for the larger benefits.

Gold Coins are a great way to rally organizational excitement and energy for a broader pursuit of data and analytics programs. There are a number of reasons for this:

• The...

Assessing your Gold Coin project

Next you need to develop a simple assessment framework. First, you should start with the key objective or expected outcome from the Gold Coin idea and then answer the following questions:

• Do we need to process millions of records or terabytes of data to achieve the project objectives? (Volume)

• Do we have data coming constantly at very frequent intervals, say less than every 15 minutes? (Velocity)

• Do we have data from multiple sources that have some common elements but look very different and are not easy to normalize? (Variety)

• Are there intermittent trust issues with some of the data that come in? (Veracity)

• Is there a dire need to get creative with visually representing the data for business users and customers to understand intuitively? (Visualization)

• Will we be able to get such data in future if we want to repeat this project for this part of the business and other similar parts of the business? (Viability)

• Do we have tangible benefits for our business? (Tangible...

Building your Gold Mine

Now you have started collecting your Gold Coins and building your opportunity landscape with Big Data. You have begun the exciting journey of building a large and very valuable portfolio of Gold Coins into a Gold Mine that will create unparalleled shareholder value for your business.

The possibilities are exhilarating; you will soon find it difficult to keep up pace with the flurry of Gold Coins and all the excitement around them. You need to take a very structured approach to keep looking for new Gold Coins and building the Gold Mine for your business. This will stop you from getting swamped and losing organizational momentum with your big data project. You have already worked on many tools that will help you in this hunt for Gold Coins.

In the previous chapter, you built a Business Catalog and an Information Catalog. In this you started with building a Data Catalog. Now, you'll build an Opportunity Catalog. Your Opportunity Catalog is a simple listing of all the...

Summary

In this chapter, you developed some perceptible opportunities around big data from some concepts and strategies discussed in the previous chapter. By now, you have:

• Built a Data Catalog

• Understood the concept of crafting business opportunities using big data analytics into Gold Coin projects

• Identified your Gold Coins

• Assessed and prioritized your Gold Coins

• Created your Opportunity Catalog and started building your Gold Mine

You are now all set to get started and raring to go.

You can get started even if you have one Gold Coin. If you are part of a smaller organization, a start-up, or just getting initiated into big data, starting with one Gold Coin is a good idea. If you have more, select the top highest ranked ones and build project teams and plans around those. It is better not to start too many because there is valuable learning from each of the projects that will help you refine your future course of action. Initially, each Gold Coin project will need lot of time from you; you will...