Big Data – Client’s Value creation and the Consultant’s Charm

According to recent data analytics study “One in three business leaders frequently make decisions without the information they need and half don't have access to the information they need to do their jobs”. The advent of Big Data in the recent past is enabling Consultants and business leaders address the business need.

“Big Data is the frontier of a firm’s ability to store, process and access all of the data it needs to operate, make decisions, reduce risks and serve customers”.

The reach of Big Data is extrapolated into seemingly physical and intuitive fields like fossil hunting by collecting geologic data. Some other intricate areas of Big Data applications are improving soldier’s efficiency, fighting cancer etc. The fact that Big Data is used in fields like fossil hunting tells us the enormous amount of information available in any field that interests us. Big data need not be limited to particular fields but can be tailored to discover information according to the needs of a particular organization. For example the IT operations in any organization deal with monitoring the productivity through pretty charts and graphs. The increasing use of Big Data “analytics” in this arena allowed big IT companies to reach the 5 nines (99.999%) of availability of IT systems. The 5 nines of availability is a system downtime of 26 secs per month. The best advantage of Big Data observed in recent times is in marketing by understanding a customer’s trend and suggesting him\her products. Thus a consultant working to improve the market for a client in FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) has a plethora of information to work on his discovery phase. He can make informed decisions from the data analytics and suggest them for clients even more quickly than the traditional practices. It is estimated that there is an increase in operating margin by more than 58% by retail organizations employing Big Data practices.

By and large the primary task of a management consultant is to Discover (i.e. gather information) and to Analyze the information and thus plan an action. The following are a few ways in which Big Data can create value and serve as a Consultant’s charm

Big Data allows a narrower segmentation of customers and therefore precise tailored products and services. The sophisticated analytics can help improve decision making. Creation of more transactional data in digital form can help organizations collect accurate and detailed performance information at a higher frequency. Big Data can also be used to improve the development of next generation products. The estimations made from Big Data can buttress new waves of productivity growth and consumer surplus. The discovery and the analyzing stages in a consultant cycle would be even faster with the emergence of Big Data globally. This is great news not just for consultants but for clients as well. On one hand the consultants work on shorter assignments. On the other hand the clients get to hire the consultants for lesser hours.