Monday, October 6, 2014

Buzzing the Big Data Buzzer

The Big Buzz around Big Data is turning out into a new phenomenon. Big Data, which fundamentally deals with enormous volume, velocity and variety of data, has itself generated huge volumes of data (in form of blogs, articles, infographics, videos, and many more formats) across all channels and networks. And this is growing very rapidly, resulting further into generation of more data. Literally, trends shows that the term Big Data has gained too much popularity in past few years.
Figure 1. Google trends showing results for word 'Big Data'

And even more interesting statistics would be that the word ‘Big Data’ on google search returns around 44,100,000 results (on 6th Oct 2014). (Source: Google.com)
So besides the increase in number of people interested in Big Data, these facts also corresponds that the digital activities around Big Data would be generating more number of clicks, page views, web logs and all sorts of structured and unstructured chunks of information increasing the digital content around Big Data. These would be further analyzed by number of analysts and data scientists, creating more number of jobs, and relevant trainings, articles, and all sorts of digital content.

In a way, Big Data boom may be fulfilling its own prophesy.

Here are some key facts about Big Data.

Big Data Universal Statistics:





Benefits solving Real Life Problems:


  • Healthcare: 20% decrease in patient mortality by analyzing streaming patient data 
  • Telco: 92% decrease in processing time by analyzing networking and call data
  • Utilities: 99% improved accuracy in placing power generation resources by analyzing 2.8 petabytes of untapped data (Source: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/industry.html )

Big Data Future Predictions:






References:

http://marciaconner.com/blog/data-on-big-data/
 http://wikibon.org/blog/big-data-statistics/
http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/news/2240111798/Analysts-Data-visualization-tools-key-to-big-data-analytics-success


http://www.bigdata-startups.com/think-bigger-developing-a-successful-big-data-strategy-for-your-business/

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Social Media Marketing

Few days back, I got a chance to talk about any topic of my interest and a nice audience to listen to me.

Looking at the current list of hot-spoken topics, I choose to share my thoughts and experiences about Social Media marketing, covering its importance and few take care areas. Here is how it goes:

(image source: http://www.heraldboy.com)

First of all, let us again recall what Social Media is. Social Media is a platform for interaction among people, where people can create, share and discuss information and ideas in digital form, across virtual communities. These virtual communities may or may not have any real-world existence. 

This social media has changed our lives drastically. There are already many articles available on this:
1)    Look Up by Gary Turk

So, i just gave a thought about it, which what is social media doing to us, or it has already done. It has given us the power to create multiple identities. Traditionally, in the real world, along the course of our lives, we do stuff like we go to school, then we go to college, we do job, we progress gradually, and that’s how we create our own identity. But with the advent of Social Media, this has changed. As any individual log-in into a social networking site, say Facebook, it creates a new virtual identity of himself. With this identity, it can attach his choices and preferences as per his own wish. And since there is no validation process for these claims made on social media, people are free to put any real or false detail, without any hesitation. They can put pictures of other people as their own profile pics, can claim to be living in any random location of choice, can talk about products they never used, or places they never visited. And due to lack of validation, the trust factor on unknown people is also almost negligent over social networks.







The complete story, including the commonly used tools and techniques, advantages of using social media, and few take care areas while using social media are available here: http://bit.ly/SMM-Blog


Please feel free to send your suggestions and comments about the same.


Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Touching EPM (Enterprise Project Management)


As a part of our job, my profile includes working with different technologies across various domains. This helps us in understanding the bigger picture about the Enterprise Architecture across various verticals.

After the exploration of the EPM tool 'Smartsheet', this time we had another chance to get a closer look at the EPM. This time we expected a deeper dive, and for that, first step was to create a baseline of our existing knowledge into a common repository.

So here is a jargon of the common terms, acronym etc. around EPM:

EPM (Enterprise Project Management) - A streamlines procedure for managing projects running across the organization.
PMO (Project Management Office) - A group or department within an organization, that deals with, defines and maintains standards for project management.
EPMO (Enterprise Project Management Office) - An enterprise level PMO.
PMM (Project Management Methodology) - The standards or guidelines followed for EPM. There are several standards (PMMs) available, including:

  • PRINCE2 (Projects in Controlled Environments, version 2) - Developed by the UK government agency Office of Government Commerce (OGC) and is used extensively within the UK government as the de facto project management standard for its public projects. 
  • PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) -  Recognized as standards by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
  • IPMA (International Project Management Association) - A federation of National PM associations, supporting role-specific competence development and certification guidelines.
The PMBOK Guide recognizes 47 processes that fall into five basic process groups and ten knowledge areas that are typical of most projects, most of the time.


The five process groups are:
  1. Initiating
  2. Planning
  3. Executing
  4. Monitoring and Controlling
  5. Closing
The ten knowledge areas are:
  1. Project Integration Management
  2. Project Scope Management
  3. Project Time Management
  4. Project Cost Management
  5. Project Quality Management
  6. Project Human Resource Management
  7. Project Communications Management
  8. Project Risk Management
  9. Project Procurement Management
  10. Project Stakeholders Management



The Project Management Institute (PMI) is a not-for-profit professional organization for the project management profession with the purpose of advancing project management. In 2007, it earned the ANSI/ISO/IEC 17024 accreditation from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for granting credentials and certifications in the field of Project Management.


Here is a short list of certifications and credentials offered by PMI:

Credentials:
  • Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)
  • Project Management Professional (PMP)
  • Program Management Professional (PgMP)
  • Portfolio Management Professional (PfMP)
  • PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
  • PMI Risk Management Professional (PMI-RMP)
  • PMI Scheduling Professional (PMI-SP)
Certification:
  • PMI Certified OPM3 Professional



Monday, March 31, 2014

Multi-Lingual Big Data – The Bigger Data

Recent technology trends shows that Big Data is one the emerging trends that is picking up fast across the organizations. It helps in unlocking the huge potential hidden underlying the huge set of information spread around us in different formats and types. And there are lot many articles already shared about what and how Big Data can be used in various industry scenarios. In this article, we try to add a totally new dimension to the Big Data thinking….a Multilingual Big Data.


 












Imagine a scenario, any international level enterprise – say some travel agency, or some hospital, or any international food chain, or some international retail chain having its presence across multiple continents across the globe. They need to daily deal with local people residing in the respective areas, and often need high level of interaction with those local people for churning out a good business. As reflected in a well-known quote from Nelson Mandela, communicating in native languages makes the easiest way to establish trust among the people.

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”              ~Nelson Mandela[1]

The enterprises can hire local people for all the verbal communications, but then there is equal amount of written communication (tickets, bills, instructions, instructions etc.) required for almost each step of interaction.
Now imagine having robust IT Systems for supporting for these native languages, so as to manage and maintain all the native communications as-is in digital formats. And not just keep the digital records, but also leveraging this digital data directly for critical business elements like business analysis and marketing strategy development etc. Ability to leverage the support for native languages can result into miraculous results in many ways. Let us take an example of the second most spoken language in the world to understand the situation better.

An example of Multi-Lingual Bigger Data - Hindi:

Hindi language is the second most spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese[2]. Indian songs and hymns have been adapted and used by various popular rap and pop music artists. From science to commerce and business to various multimedia as shown India to becoming a viable world economy with increasing interest in the world.
Recent study by global firms also mentions that many Top global IT firms have more staff in India than home nations.[3] This fact is enough to suggest that almost every big enterprise is now willing to have presence in India. With having a such a huge workforce working for all major enterprises of the world, just image the way things could be turned around by putting an integrated system for taking inputs in their local language (most prominent of which is Hindi), doing analysis of that data within its native format, and then producing outcome analysis and reports directly in the same language. Employees getting training in their local languages, using Hindi language take feedback from end customers, and leveraging them directly into analytical purposes. Information available on page-scans written in local languages can directly go into systems. Preparing product collaterals (like user manuals), or doing analysis (sentiment analysis) could become so faster if data can be leveraged directly from source into the advanced IT systems. Instructions can be generated in native languages, so that every local native can understand them. This can just accelerate the rate at which entire business cycle moves.

 

Other benefactors:

Ability to leverage the support for native languages can result into miraculous results not only for the enterprises, but also for the local agencies like Government departments, small and medium industries, where mostly local people are both the employees and the end users. Entire departments running on their local languages would be able to take advantage of the faster  processing and analytical capabilities of such advanced technology concepts…known as big data, and targeting to  (soon or later) become a Bigger Data.

 Do let us know your feedback about this post on Twitter: @bigdataindiya or Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigDataIndia 

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