SBM ITB invited Pujo Laksono, a Data Scientist at PT Kazee Digital Indonesia as a guest lecturer in the Qualitative Research Methodology course on Tuesday (22/11). On this occasion, Pujo provided insight into business intelligence and its application in daily life.
Pujo started the lecture by explaining big data, a term that describes the large volume of structured and unstructured data that covers daily business. It’s not the amount of data that determines a company’s success but what a company does with their data.
Big data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better strategic business decisions and moves. The term “big data” refers to data that is so large, fast, or complex that it is difficult or impossible to process using traditional methods—accessing and storing large amounts of information for analytics has been around for a long time.
Companies can take data from any source and analyze it to find possible answers, such as determining the root causes of failures, problems, and imminent failures, analyzing buying habits or customer activity, recalculating the entire risk portfolio in a matter of minutes, etc.
Pujo added that there are unstructured and structured data in big data. Structured data usually resides in a relational database. The field stores data restricted in length, such as a phone number, social security number, or ZIP code.
The record even contains variable-length text strings, such as names, making it easy to search. This format is highly searchable by human-made queries and algorithms that use data types and field names, such as alphabetic or numeric, currency, or dates.
Standard relational database applications with structured data covering airline reservation systems, inventory control, sales transactions, and ATM activity. Structured Query Language (SQL) enables queries on this type of structured data in relational databases.
Meanwhile, unstructured data is stored in its original format and is not processed until it is used, known as schema-on-read. It comes in various file formats, including emails, social media posts, presentations, chats, IoT sensor data, and satellite imagery.
Unstructured data is qualitative rather than quantitative, meaning it is more characteristic and categorical. This is perfect for determining a marketing campaign’s effectiveness or uncovering potential buying trends via social media and review sites. It can also be useful for companies by helping to monitor policy compliance, as it can be used to detect patterns in chats or suspicious email trends.
Several use cases demonstrate the impact big data has on businesses across various industry sectors, such as 360-degree customer views and enhanced business intelligence; increased customer acquisition and retention; better fraud prevention and cybersecurity; improved forecasting and price optimization; and improved personalization and recommendations.
