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Find Your Dream JobOrganisations of all scales and nearly across all sectors are now becoming increasingly data-driven, especially as larger data storage systems and faster computers continue to push the performance envelope.
The groundwork, therefore, for the next evolutionary milestone has been laid, and this has allowed big data to take off in a major way, expanding into new domains and giving businesses some very powerful ways to uncover insights to improve their offerings, increase ROI and, ultimately, serve their customers and stakeholders a lot better.
In this deep and insightful post we’re going to discuss what big data consulting services are, why they are important to businesses, and what kind of problems they help solve.
Big data refers to the massive volumes of digital information (structured and unstructured) organisations can tap into in order to discover patterns, which can help them uncover insights into, say, customer behaviour, competitor strategies, or specific areas of business which are lacking and require improvement.
Once uncovered, these patterns become the foundations for well-informed decision-making to help the business grow and expand or meet its respective objectives.
But don’t businesses already have access to this data in some form or the other, for instance, through surveys, customer feedback emails, or marketing campaigns?
While the above can help to answer some questions around customer pain points or product/service related shortcomings, they cannot help uncover insights, patterns, and trends which can potentially give businesses a competitive edge, and often by a pretty wide margin too.
Big data itself is very vast and complicated. It’s the kind of data which traditional data processing systems cannot handle, let alone collect and manage. The nature of big data itself can either be structured, semi-unstructured, or fully unstructured. And, that’s just another aspect of it which requires specialised systems and tools to help businesses make sense of the patterns and trends they uncover through big data.
This is where big data analytics and big data consultancy come in, which essentially refer to the practice of evaluating, cleaning, transforming, and modelling the data to uncover some incredibly useful, usable, and meaningful information in order to draw conclusions around specific aspects of the business – for example, customer behaviour, service/product issues, and other aspects, like we discussed earlier.
While we’re on the subject of big data consultancy and big data consultants, it’s also worth understanding what big data analytics are and how they differ from big data consulting services, for example.
Big data analytics refers to the technique data scientists use to extract meaningful and insightful information from a large data set. So, this is essentially the process of extracting specific insights from huge volumes of unstructured data.
Now, what’s important to understand is that within the big data analytics umbrella, there are different processes being utilised to help analyse the large data sets. From specific methodologies to different programming techniques, to data mining and data analysis tools, big data analytics is a highly technical process which only professional data engineers and data scientists are qualified to do.
Big data consultancy is a term used to describe companies which specialise in offering big data management services. It’s kind of like working with an outsourced or managed IT services provider who helps businesses manage different aspects of their IT infrastructure – so, in this case, big data consulting services help to manage different aspects of big data analytics. This includes the challenges revolving around working with big data, specific solutions to business problems using the big data, and uncovering the desired insights to help businesses make more informed decisions.
Working with a big data consulting services provider has become very important in this day and age, especially with the global and economic challenges every business faces each day, and the increasingly fierce competitiveness within each sector, for example.
Big data consultants are trained to decipher extremely large and complex data sets, transforming them into understandable and actionable insights which businesses can use for some very powerful and well-informed decision-making. In this day and age, sometimes, that’s all you may need to gain a competitive edge or be better prepared to face upcoming business challenges, for instance.
In a nutshell, you need to be working with experts who are familiar with both big data analytics and big data consultancy. At the end of the day, working with a big data consulting services provider who has a demonstrable track record means that you can quickly:
Find new business opportunities which were otherwise not discoverable or you didn’t even know existed
Accelerate the business decision-making process to make more informed decisions with less risks and/or repercussions involved
Alert your decision-makers and key stakeholders to looming dangers, risks, or problems which can seriously hamper growth
As we discussed at the start of the article, big data consultancy is all about analysing and scrutinising huge volumes of business data to help unearth hidden patterns, trends, and correlations – all of which can help businesses gain very powerful and actionable insights. This, in itself, offers a major competitive advantage: where your competitors may be using different forms of marketing, advertising, surveying or polls to find the data they need, you are already several steps ahead of them, looking at big data to uncover hidden trends and patterns.
Big data consulting services help businesses leverage highly advanced data analytics to make sense of massive data sets, derive hidden insights and patterns from them, and come up with effective strategies to leverage this data in the best way possible to improve their bottom line. By partnering with a team of expert big data consultants, you can:
Have customised recommendations for decision-making based on your current business setup and desired outcomes
Roll out your big data initiatives with a lot more accuracy and speed
Focus on your core business functions and/or objectives instead of constantly worrying about how to leverage your big data or how to use it to implement solutions, for example
Fully comply with regulatory, security, and compliance guidelines without worrying about how lack of compliance may negatively impact your big data projects
Apply tried-and-tested industry best practices to get faster and more optimised results from your big data initiatives
What can set one business apart is its ability to make decisions – make the right ones, make them at the right time, and under the right circumstances.
Since most business decisions today are data-driven and not based on ‘gut’ instinct, the more accurate this data is, the better decisions it will drive for the business. The days of using data as a decision-making aid or enhancement are long gone – today, it is a prerequisite for well-informed decision-making.
Big data has helped to change the way businesses move their operations forward, and a large aspect of that operational success has to do with how they collect data, and how they transform it into accurate as well as actionable insights, all of which can benefit the business in real-time. Let’s take a look at four key ways big data consulting services can help to solve real-world enterprise problems:
Irrespective of your business vertical, in-depth market research is something that’s probably been integrated into your business objectives since day one. Customer demands, needs, and aspirations are always shifting, and so, businesses must find clever ways to (literally) get into the heads of their customers and see what makes them tick.
Furthermore, to improve upon their products and services, and ensure that they are in line with customers' needs, demands, and aspirations – businesses must work with big data consultants to have massive volumes of data analysed on a regular basis, in addition to the detailed market research they are already carrying out.
This is just one way big data can help enhance your market research and, in turn, your products and services.
Even if you have a good command over current market technologies and trends, you can always use an extra hand to better understand future trends and, thus, the future needs of your business.
Through big data predictive analysis, you can gain insights into how trends, technologies, market conditions, or demand for a specific product/service may change – giving you a powerful competitive edge over your peers. Armed with this knowledge, you would have already made key decisions to propel your business forward, whereas your competitors will have some catching up to do (assuming they aren’t already tapping into big data consulting services).
While data centralisation has its own advantages, particularly in a large enterprise environment, a common business challenge often arises when large data silos leads to the decentralisation of data, preventing the enterprise team from working on the same page. With current practices involved in centralising data somewhat outdated, big data helps to mitigate these challenges, offering complete data visibility and centralisation throughout the organisational ranks.
Streamlining business processes from time to time is a critical practice for any business that wants to remain sustainable and continue to generate revenue. Big data can help to not only reduce operational costs and overheads but also help you utilise your existing business processes more efficiently – from materials procurement to final delivery and maintaining an optimal supply chain, for example.
However, we’ve barely scratched the surface here in terms of the scale of solutions big data consultancy offers to a variety of business challenges. Let’s explore these in more detail:
One of the most common problems big data consultancy helps to resolve are those around market-driven decisions. For example, by integrating real-time analytics with AI, you can better analyse the ingestion, processing and streaming of your data to uncover insights which, in turn, will help you make more accurate predictions and better informed decisions.
By having access to this continuous intelligence, you can easily operate time-sensitive processes using the latest, most accurate, and most intuitive insights to boost your bottom line. Furthermore, real-time AI provides for personalisation and recommendations to help you implement the appropriate targeting for clients, increasing brand engagement and order value, as well as making for more effective monetisation. When you make decisions in real-time with agility at the core, you are effectively delivering the right services to the right people with a significant competitive edge.
Real-time streaming alone, for example, can help you process massive volumes of data in the quickest, most efficient manner possible, helping to react proactively to changing business conditions in real-time. Real-time analytics can be applied to anything from network monitoring and e-commerce to pricing, risk management and fraud detection.
With more organisations utilising big data, it has become even more important to ensure that the data is always secure, and out of the hands of unwanted or unauthorised individuals. Therefore, it is necessary to develop the appropriate information security policies, identify potential security risks, evaluate and mitigate security threats, etc.
With the right big data security architecture in place, you can safeguard your distributed programming frameworks, secure non-relational data, secure data storage and transaction logs, preserve data privacy, meet security compliance in real-time, and more.
Organisations of all scales are now paying a lot more attention to their big data security measures, as it helps them host sensitive data in the cloud in an even more secure way, detect insider threats more quickly, and track as well as analyse users' behaviour to detect suspicious patterns, ultimately, preventing big data security breaches.
Data analytics consultancy empower enterprises to discover deep and actionable insights which can help them boost overall operational efficiency and drive their businesses better toward the next phase of growth.
Data discovery, for example, helps to prevent the loss of sensitive information, enabling organisations to implement the right security measures, thus, allowing teams to look for and reveal deeper insights. Advanced intelligence make the data-drive decision-making process more efficient and easier to understand, presenting information in an easily interpretable way so that decision-makers can better drive the desired outcomes.
Augmented analytics integrate NLP (natural language processing), ML (machine learning), and DL (deep learning) for data preparation, processing and management, leading to intelligent insights which can drive faster data-driven decisions.
Advanced big data consultancy and analytics are helping businesses deliver real business insights, and much faster than other businesses which are not actively tapping into the real-world benefits big data consulting services offer.
Ultimately, these big data analytics solutions can help businesses automate the process of transforming raw data into insights, facilitating them in quickly achieving goals which revolve around predicting customer behaviour, for instance, or customer retention.
Being “big data ready” can improve the data analytics workflow of any business, no matter what their budget, scale or sector. However, it’s important to work with expert big data consultants who have years of expertise around the different options to consider when it comes to implementing big data analytics into your business workflow.
Partnering with a big data consultancy expert has significant benefits over trying to manage the same big data goals and objectives internally, such as:
An internal implementation of big data means you will need to hire a dedicated and talented team comprising data engineers, scientists, analysts and software developers. In addition, you’ll also need to invest in the specialised tools, software, and equipment needed to analyse your big data.
Should anything go wrong, dealing with the repercussions is something many unlucky businesses have described as a “nightmare” (where they have attempted to do data analysis and analytics on their own).
On the other hand, it’s far more cost-effective to work with a team of external big data consultants who are familiar with your business, competitors, and sector. This will help you get things done a lot faster, and at significantly reduced costs to your project budget.
A big data consulting services partner is someone who is a domain expert and has the practical experience as well as knowhow to apply big data analytics to a range of industries. This means that your big data solutions can be designed and implemented at an optimal pace. The required processes will already be in place and you won’t need to go through any staff onboarding as such. Both these key advantages alone lead to a significantly reduced turnaround time in terms of big data integration.
Working with a dedicated big data consultancy expert means that you have a lot of flexibility in terms of scaling your project as and when needed. There’s no need at all to hire in-house specialists to adjust this scale, and the big data solutions will always be conceived according to your ongoing data needs as well as future ones.
Data analytics is a significant investment which requires extensive resources and effort. In most cases, businesses find themselves deviating from their core objectives to pursue big data projects, which disrupts their day-to-day workflow.
However, working with a dedicated big data consulting services provider allows your team to focus on the core day-to-day business processes, helping you manage it effectively and stay on the path to growth.
The Economic Times predicted in 2022 that big data consultants would be the most in-demand talent across nearly all sectors. Keeping in view that over 95% of companies were planning to hire big data analysts in 2022, it has proven to be challenging to find the right talent for effectively implementing big data analytics according to each business’s respective goals.
This is why many businesses utilise their budget in a much smarter way by collaborating with big data consultants, essentially gaining access to a broad pool of big data talent and domain expertise.
Even large, well-known enterprises at present, despite having more than ample resources to implement big data strategies through an in-house team, are relying on big data consultancy to obtain the necessary knowhow and get expert advice on each stage of implementation.
Furthermore, SMEs are also establishing comprehensive and scalable big data analytics frameworks – which are very time-consuming and resource-demanding – making big data consulting services the perfect vehicle to help small-to-medium businesses scale their efforts quickly as and when needed.
The advantages of implementing big data correctly and its ability to solve real-world business problems are wide and varied. From faster decision-making and deeper insights to real-time reporting, robust threat and fraud detection, big data analytics can give businesses a serious competitive edge, but only if each stage is implemented in an efficient and practical manner.
Collaborating with a big data consulting services provider who has a demonstrable success track record is one way to overcome the challenges associated with implementing a robust big data analytics framework.
And, it makes a lot of business sense to do so as the cost of recruiting in-house big data talent is simply too high – even if you manage to make good use of your big data budget, a general lack of awareness around your business’s systems and how to transform them according to the desired big data model almost always gets in the way.
At Fast Data Science, we help business of all scales and across all industries determine the best big data technologies, from integration to optimisation to management, we implement the systems and processes needed to help you gain the necessary insights, making the decision-making process faster, more agile, and more resource-effective. Learn more: +44 20 3488 5740.
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Meta description: Big data consulting services and the problems they help solve
Big data consultancy is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a must-have for any business that wishes to remain competitive in a largely digitally driven market.
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