Businesses must adapt to deal with big data - Lightstone

Royden Volans, commercial director at Lightstone, specialists in spatial and data driven insights, says it is critical for companies to put strategies in place in order to ensure they are managing and addressing their data needs. "There is an enormous amount of valuable information at the disposal of organisations. However, in today's highly competitive environment, it ultimately relies on executive appetite to prioritise initiatives to consume and leverage it," he says.

CDs would reach the moon

Volans explains that while the concept of big data is not new, the volume, variety and velocity of data is increasing to such an extent that organisations need to start adapting the way in which they deal with big data. "In 2007 the world could store 295 billion gigabytes. To put this into perspective, one would need about 404 billion CDs to store this data. If you stack those CDs on top of one another, it would be able to reach the moon, and go 25% past it. Globally, 2.5 exabytes of data are created each day, and this doubles every 40 months," says Volans.

The massive growth in two way communications - a major contributor to the exponential growth in data - can be attributed to the rise of social media, the growth in technology and the growth in location-based services.

"Social media plays a significant role in the rise in data. Currently, approximately 500 billion minutes are being spent on Facebook per month - the month before this figure was only 150 billion minutes - so the growth is exponential. Furthermore, as conversations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult for organisations to keep track of this valuable information. The reality is that the pervasiveness of data is increasing all the time - so the big question is what organisations are doing to accommodate that," he says.

Interpreting big data

Many organisations are still not at a point of being able to effectively integrate or aggregate the information available to them. The development of tools and infrastructure through which companies can simply and quickly interpret big data is crucial.

He points to the insurance industry as an example. "There are in excess of 325 million pieces of data to describe catastrophe risk in South Africa. However, in order for insurance companies and other stakeholders to calculate the probability of the risk, you need to be able to access, aggregate and interpret this data.
Furthermore, the aggregation of each one of the elements required for one property and one quote requires this to be done quickly and consistently."

According to Volans, the major challenges to effective use of big data boil down to finding the right resources to work with the data, data quality, storage problems and the modernisation or real-time ability of information generation.

Use innovations available

In order to address these issues, organisations need to make use of innovations available and already aggregating the vast volumes of data in order to relieve the pressure on their internal data resources.

Applications such as the VVi app, developed by Lightstone that can generate instant vehicle validation reports by scanning the VIN number on the vehicle's licence disc with a smartphone - thereby providing both car dealers and insurers with valuable time saving in confirming the details of a vehicle.

"The time has come for companies to pay serious attention to how they are structuring and utilising their data. Organisations need to prioritise according to the data they are capturing and put a process in place to get executive commitment to drive these activities," he urges.