There is a great deal of data available to the corporate world. Data generated by their own transactions as well as external data. What dilemmas do companies face relative to managing mass amounts of data? How do they manage it? Discuss some examples of how companies are managing large amounts of data, where the data is coming from and what are some of the issues/dilemmas. Conduct Research about Big Data.

1. What have you found as the description of Big Data?

2. What are the primary issues?

3. What is the value of the data gathered by Walmart on Black Friday?

4. What will they do with it?

5. How will a functional area (your major) use big data?

6. How can the department or company make sense of all that data?

7. Conduct some research and compare BI and a database . Briefly describe how they are similar, the same, different, and how they relate to big data

Remember to cite your sources! This should be limited to two pages if possible.

PART 1- Enhancing Business Intelligence Using Information Systems

Business Intellegence (BI) is a group of software programs and technologies used for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data. It is allows the organization identify and analyze their own business data such as sales revenue by categories such as products, income, production costs etc... BI helps the company/organization/enterprise employees make better business decisions. The more informed they are the better decisions they make for the growth and sustainability of the organization.

BI applications include the activities of decision support, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining. With the gathering of data from the organization database an employee can see historical, current and predictive views of business operations allowing them to make valuable strategic decisions. BI systems are also called decision support systems or competitive intelligence for they support the decision making process.

Business Intellegence (BI) is a group of software programs and technologies used for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data. It is allows the organization identify and analyze their own business data such as sales revenue by categories such as products, income, production costs etc... BI helps the company/organization/enterprise employees make better business decisions. The more informed they are the better decisions they make for the growth and sustainability of the organization.

BI applications include the activities of decision support, query and reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), statistical analysis, forecasting, and data mining. With the gathering of data from the organization database an employee can see historical, current and predictive views of business operations allowing them to make valuable strategic decisions. BI systems are also called decision support systems or competitive intelligence for they support the decision making process.

BIG DATA

Big Data is a term to represent the massive groups of data that organizations have gathered over the years from transactions, customer interaction as well as other means. Companies can gather patterns and trends from these large data sets. When you think about the customer business intelligence a company can develop from massive sets of data, they can get to know more about you and your buying patterns than you would think. Data is gathered from every transaction you make. When you use your credit or debit card, when you view websites or search Google there is data being gathered and analyzed about you. It is what they call a form of customer DNA.

There is a great deal of research that shows the need for understanding and using this "BIG" data is immense when it comes to companies being able to look at what the world is saying about their product, or what their competitors are doing, or who is searching for words that may be used in describing their product. Big Data includes data from many different sources such as Tweets, Google searches, Facebook posts, Pinterest pins, credit card use, online purchases, Amazon or Ebay searches, etc. All the actions taken on these various online sources are considered data and are stored somewhere. Therefore, organizations must consider that there is:

• an increase in the amount data generated ie..social media

• a need for organizations to drill into massive amounts of data

• a lack of resources to address analytical initiatives

By 2016, 4.4 million IT jobs globally will be created to supporting data, generating 1.9 million IT jobs in the United States. In addition, every big data-related role in the U.S. will create employment for three people outside of IT, so over the next four years a total of 6 million jobs in the U.S. will be generated by the information economy. ( Gartner et al., 2012)
Big Data consists of :

• Volume - so much data from so many different sources. In the past, excessive data volume created a storage issue. But that is not the case any longer because storage is much cheaper now. However, other issues emerge, including how to determine relevance of all the data and how to create value from data that is relevant.

• Variety -so many different formats like a tweet vs. a facebook post or a credit card purchase vs. a product search. Even non numerical data needs to be analyzed!

• Velocity - data is being produced so fast these days it creates challenges for organizations on how quickly they need to react to this data and use it strategically.

Not only will there be jobs in IT, there will be jobs in all functional areas for those who know how to analyze data gathered from many sources like "the cloud". Having this knowledge will give you a competitive advantage.