Discussion Post

When responding to your peers, comment on possible problems for a particular company or industry sector when data is not well managed.

Peer Response:

Describe why big data has become a hot topic in the business world

Well, I can say from experience as well as echo what the article stated which is that its critical today for companies to find ways to leverage big data to their benefit. The internet opened a world of possibilities and consumers are basically giving data away: where they like to shop, sites they frequent, television shows they like, etc. It would be stupid for a company not to use that information to their advantage to generate more revenue for their organizations. Furthermore, big data allows companies to cater selections perfectly for their customers, resulting in almost (and what you hope are) guaranteed sales. The goal is to make money â big data gives you an opportunity to not only widen your market, but also allow you to determine what direction to take your organization in the future in order to be successful. As the article says, the trick is to figure out how to organize and leverage that data. Additionally, I was reading an article a month or two ago in AdWeek, and the author (Julie Fleischer, Vice President of Product Marketing at Neustar) is famous in the industry for calling all data âcrapâ and I think she is totally right. Itâs useless unless you know how to consume it and quantify it. The key is not just data, its quality data.

The other thing about big data to me is, where does the line get drawn? Many might feel that keeping this kind of information is invasive, which it is in a sense. So how do we walk the line between jumping into a personâs home and procuring data? I always find myself conflicted by this question so Iâd be interested to know what you guys might think.

Pick a company and explain what it does.

Altice USA is an international telecommunications company. They provide any and all telecommunications related services in 5 countries, including phone service, internet, proprietary content and cable video services.

Identify an example of one table of data that the company might have and seven data fields that it might collect for that table. For example, every bank has a table that contains all customer personal information, including last name, first name, social security number, account number, street address, city, state, and ZIP code. (Note: Street address, city, state, and ZIP code are all different fields)

Altice USA would likely want the following fields for the cable video services department: box serial number, number of reboots, time spent on each channel or show, channel tuning, demographic information (this is a laundry list of data fields on its own, but we will keep in simple for the purpose of the assignment), income information, household tuning counts per network and that is just a few. I would imagine the amount of data fields would circle the earth twice! This makes me come back to my point earlier about it being critical to find ways to organize the data properly, as well as quantify how useful it is to the organization. While procuring the data is critical, for extremely large companies like Altice, its equally critical to know exactly how to use the data obtained to the companyâs benefit.

References: AdWeek, Issue Dated 4/24/2017, âHow To Tell if Your Data is Crapâ by Julie Fleischer