The concept of "Big Data" has been bandied about for a couple of years now. Many organizations have explored, if not implemented, methods to take advantage of this idea. While it is widely believed that predictive analytics based on big data is useful only for marketing purposes or to increase sales, the fact of the matter is that it is being used for a variety of other purposes.
By now many have heard of examples like the following true story. A large national retailer tracks the purchases of all of its female customers signed up on its baby registry. The retailer figures out that these customers buy large quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester and, in the first 20 weeks, stock up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc.
Customers who follow such buying patterns, regardless of whether they are on the baby registry, are then targeted with specific ads and coupons for pregnancy- and baby-related items.
A little creepy? Yes. Effective? According to the retailer, absolutely!
We’ve heard and seen many stories like this one, but how can big data and predictive analytics affect other industries?
Many credit a significant portion of the success of President Barack Obama’s campaign to big-data techniques. The president’s campaign utilized unprecedented methods of data gathering, such as mobile apps and social media, in addition to burning up the phone lines to the tune of 1.2 million calls per day. Commercially available predictive analytics software was used to work with this vast amount of data.
The campaign was so confident in its data systems, it claimed to be confident of knowing the names and addresses of every one of the nearly 70 million voters who voted for Obama in 2008. How did they do this? Similar to the retail example above, presumably they were able to take data from known voters (like those on the baby registry) and extrapolate those data onto unknown voters to figure out who was who.
This is just one example of how the campaign employed big data. And we all know the results.
Another area in which we are also seeing big-data methods is criminal justice or, more specifically, crime prevention. By monitoring the habits of known criminals, law enforcement agencies are taking action whenever similar behavior is exhibited by other individuals.
Of course, these types of actions can be scary. In the case of voting or crime prevention, the impact of the results can be much scarier than figuring out whether someone’s pregnant. Like many other examples from the past, we expect to experience growing pains as this technology matures.
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John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 25 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. Reach him at johnagsalud@yahoo.com.
