NUMBERS, TEXT, AND MORE
But volume is just one of several factors that define big data. A second is variety. Not only does the data come from a wide range of sources, but it may include more than structured data—information recorded in fields within databases. Big data may also encompass information contained in text, image files, and other formats.
“The data is not just numbers anymore,” says Erick Brethenoux, director of business analytics and decision management strategy at IBM. “Companies have access to a lot of unstructured data—for example, from social media sites, online communities, and call centers. They also get feedback from drivers about vehicle performance.”
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EXTRACTING INSIGHT FROM OCEANS OF DATA
Although the term big data is a recent addition to the lexicon, the idea that companies might pull important insights from vast oceans of ones and zeroes is not new.
“There have always been cases where data has been too big for the available tools,” says Mark Flaherty, chief marketing officer at InetSoft Technology, a business intelligence technology developer based in Piscataway, N.J. In the 1980s, for example, telecommunications providers collected data on the traffic they carried, in volumes too large for them to analyze through available means.
Today, however, the market offers new tools for extracting meaning from masses of data, so big data is garnering fresh attention.
DIGGING INTO 5 MILLION TRANSACTIONS
Among supply chain organizations, much of the big data action involves mining information from large volumes of business transactions. Shippers use business intelligence tools to pull data from multiple sources, merge and analyze it, and create reports to present the results.
One company that uses big data that way is Avnet, a Phoenix-based global distributor of electronic components. Mainly a small-parcel shipper, Avnet conducts more than five million shipping transactions annually. “Each of those transactions has more than 50 columns of data, resulting in more than 250 million data values,” says Marianne McDonald, the company’s vice president of global transportation.