SigmaWay Blog

Big Data and analytics have a huge role to play in the future of healthcare. Data will play a major role in deciding how healthcare companies, practitioners and technologies interact with their patients. Big Data ensures efficiency and accuracy in predicting treatments. Using data, doctors can make more accurate predictions based on the specifics of the patient rather than using a general rule for treatment. Major companies are venturing into healthcare by formulating pre-defined algorithms; making it easier to cure complex medical conditions. With the advent of Big Data in healthcare, people will have the opportunity to keep a track of their health; doctors will have a better idea of somebody’s health thus allowing them to provide health advices on the go. Read more at: http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/big-data-has-a-huge-part-to-play-in-the-future-of-healthcare

A firm needs to build a firm base that gradually can destroy others. The amount of information produced by social media platforms is an excellent way to measure a business’s both real and potential value. 56% of marketers named the ‘inability to tie social media to business outcomes’ as the central challenge to measuring ROI from social media. Gauging customer demand prior to launch using social media helps minimize risk, especially for entrants. Social media data can be correlated with an organization’s KPIs to know their impact upon one another indicating its usefulness. Allowing big data analytics capabilities to the social media platform helps firms to cross-reference social data to other data streams from their business. Read more about this article at: http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/social-media-analytics

Maximizing ROI has become the ultimate goal for Marketers. Increasing visibility, likes, followers and tweets seems to be the major indicators. Daniel Newman, author of The Millennial CEO and a Forbes contributor, in an article in Forbes term these indicators as vanity metrics which distract marketers from the actual story. Rather than measuring likes, focus should be on how many of the likes were converted into new customer and other measures which go beyond customer acquisition and sales that will help discern their real growth story. 

He lists out 7 things that marketers should measure: 

• Top of funnel conversions

• Engagement

• Customer satisfaction

• Customer Retention 

• Employee satisfaction 

• Employee retention 

• Attributable Revenue

For more on this, follow the link http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2015/05/12/7-things-marketers-should-measure-big-data-can-help/

Data mining results can be used by organizations to prevent losses ahead of time. Organizations usually use indications like inventory levels or employee turnover, which occur later in the business cycle to gauge shrinkage cost but by that time the losses start to incur and there is nothing much that can be done. According to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, if companies gather and analyse data, they are able to get better insights into the business and use the early warning indicators to stop losses from happening by making informed, strategic decisions, thereby saving time, money and effort. Read more at: http://www.tibco.com/blog/2015/06/03/strategic-data-analytics-to-help-reduce-shrinkage/

Big data is set to change the healthcare landscape offering better patient care, minimized hospital re-admission, and reduced costs but every new tool has a learning curve and so does this one in the healthcare industry. Big data in healthcare is referred to as Electronic Health records (EHRs), though relatively easy to collect but volume does not mean insight, it is necessary to extract data relevant to the heart of the specific problem. Apart from the 3Vs in big data – Volume, Variety, velocity, healthcare analytics also has another V, Veracity i.e. truthfulness or credibility, since it involves life and death decisions. But it is still a goal and not reality since the quality of healthcare data is highly variable. Another challenge is that the methodology requires technology and professional expertise for predictive analysis to fully utilise the data mining results to improve patient care. Read more at: https://www.healthcatalyst.com/3-reasons-why-comparative-analytics-predictive-analytics-and-nlp-wont-solve-healthcares-problems/

Now big data will help diagnose climate change. Shalene Gupta from Fortune talks about five big data projects that are on verge of changing the way we look at the problem of climate change. From tracking deforestation in Amazon, graphing animal life in African Savannah, tracking illegal forest fires to telling people how much energy they consume compared to their neighbors, we have it all in these 5 big data projects-

• Google Earth Engine

• Madingley Model form Microsoft

• Data.gov’s climate

• Global Forest Watch

• Opower

For more interesting insights follow the link http://fortune.com/2015/02/14/big-data-climate-change/

Nowadays, daily sales are not enough to ensure longevity of a business. Markets are beginning to realize the necessity of predicting future sales. They are tapping into the business trends and applying machine learning algorithms on big data to allow businesses to maximize their efforts in the most profitable areas. By knowing ahead of time, what a customer will buy, profits can be maximized and businesses can be tailored accordingly. Predictive Analytics allows us to segment customers, find patterns in their behavior and take preemptive measures to reduce churn. Analytics can be used to identify correlations and also to find causation. It can allow us to predict an individual's purchase behavior once we understand the causation underlying a pattern. Read more at: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2934086/business-intelligence/marketers-are-betting-big-on-predictive-analytics.html

Social media, due to its immense popularity, is being used for branding. It is paving a way for small businesses to compete with their bigger counterparts. Social media has led to consumer empowerment thus allowing them to interact with one another, ignoring the established channels of marketing. Adopting a mobile strategy is critical for marketers, and almost every individual in today's world possesses a mobile phone. Social media can both strengthen a brand or lead to its demise. Companies should be able to quickly adopt new strategies in response to consumer preferences to be successful. Read more at: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7953-social-media-branding.html

Marketers need to think creatively for building an effective and creative campaign. On the other side, they have to give returns on investments. So, marketers are feeling stressed. To improve the performance of the marketers, they need to make standardization a priority across their organization. Standardization is an essential practice to improve the performances and gives long-term benefits. Scott Vaughan (CMO of Integrate) in his article at marketingland.com, discussed about five areas where marketers should start standardizing are:
• Process
• Data
• Key technology systems
• Metrics and Benchmarks
• Team Expectations
Read more at: http://marketingland.com/marketers-time-stop-standardize-130267

With increasing use of smart phones in today's life, most of the viewers are using smart phones for research and buying online. This is the biggest opportunity to the companies. Mobile is not just an e-commerce channel, but it can be used for building relationship with your customers. Brian Rigney (CEO at Zmags) in his article “Maximize Marketing Reach: A Glance at the Customer Is All You Get” at marketingland.com, discussed about four simple steps to deliver rich and creative campaigns at the right place and says, “52 percent of Web traffic to retail websites globally currently comes via smartphones and tablet devices.”  Steps are:
• Think for omni-channel and use holistic approach.
• Develop sites, offers and experiences in different ways to serve different channels.
• Create, adjust and preview the sites.
• Tap the knowledge base to understand what works for your organization.
To know more about these steps, follow this link: http://marketingland.com/reach-glance-get-often-small-window-130011

Big data, legacy data, operational data and streaming data - these are all impacting the ever-increasing volumes, velocity and variety of data. - Deepak Belur (In4Group). Data and analytics have become essential to formulate critical business decisions. The big data storage technology is capable of analyzing massive amounts of data. But, analyzing a big data rarely gives you a full picture. To analyze full picture, a company need to analyze “unstructured data” which is present in mainframe servers. This data can be analyzed by using performance analytics. Enterprises need to combine relational and non-relational data, open system and mainframe, to retrieve the combined information via a simple, single query or request. And they need agile data architecture. Timeliness, accuracy, usability and accessibility of data are critical factors in the successful decision making process. Read more at: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=143791

TV is the giant megaphone- Isaac Weber (VP of strategy at MarketShare) of their marketing budget in these mediums of advertising. But according to a latest study by MarketShare a market analytics company,” TV advertisements has remained the most effective medium of advertisements.” According to the study, the premium digital video delivered higher average returns than short-form video content from non-premium publishers. TV is the only medium which maintains its effectiveness over five years while other media are declined by more than 10%. TV marketers can optimize their spending by leveraging data sources. To know more about the study, follow this link: http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/why-tv-still-most-effective-advertising-medium-165247

Data, guided by technology, always provides precision to a marketer’s intuition. While technologists favour conservative decision-making on the basis of comparative testing, marketers prefer taking risks and walking the extra mile. Now-a-days, as a company's profitability depends on its digital marketing capability, to a large extent, customer data and analytics, mostly decides a company’s success rate. On the other hand, technologists also facilitate in isolating the redundant tools and programmes in the system, thereby cleaning the system and reducing unnecessary expenditure. The right marketing technology makes the decision-making process less complicated thus proving once more, the importance of the relationship between marketing and technology.
Read more at: http://www.cio.com/article/2933479/marketing/how-to-strike-a-balance-between-marketing-and-tech.html

Sigmaway uses data analytics technologies to deliver business insights from your marketing data. Contact us at contact@gosigmaway.com for a demo.

Even in this multichannel world, customers still prefer to call in and hence voice channel is critical to a business. These days’ businesses are coming to a standstill when it comes to listening to conversations that flow through their voice channel as they are stuck on sampling and high cost manual monitoring. A recent survey showed that it is important to link online marketing to offline sales.
Mining for the truths and hidden meanings from these conversations is crucial. Previously automatic data mining of the voice channel was unattainable. But now with conversation analysis it is possible. Being in the century of customers, the ability for the company representatives to understand the customer, be empathic and deliver fast solution is essential.
Thanks to conversational analysis or text mining, it is now possible to extract data from conversations, to automate and process this data in real-time and at scale. Thus listening to and analyzing conversations helps the representatives to build better relationships and in turn provide customers with the experience they expect.
Sigmaway provides text mining solutions for businesses. Contact us at contact@gosigmaway.com for a proof of concept.
Read more at: http://smartdatacollective.com/calljourney/304151/are-you-listening-your-conversations

Fascinating, the first word that comes to the mind. Drones and big data are bonding pretty well these days and can be a successful recipe for innovations. 

Jonathan Buckley, senior vice president of marketing at Qubole, gives us a glimpse of this promising combo but not without the challenges. 

Agriculture, disaster relief and anti-poaching are some area where the combination has worked wonders. Needless to say more such wonders are in pipeline. But, yes there is a ‘butt’ of challenges attached here. The data gathered by drones is immense, it will require real time big data analytics and ad-hoc analysis to improve. But, one can feel optimistic about the future.

Have a look at  http://smartdatacollective.com/jonathanbuckley/316611/growing-relationship-between-drones-and-big-data

Don't ignore your supply chain risks if you love your profits, that's the advice Keith Peterson, president and CEO of Halo, is giving in his article. He talks about:

• Various supply chain risks
• The department they affect
• Its financial impacts
• Finally! Solution. 

Solution to all the problems these days is in analytics. Right software and analytics programme will increase your profit generating abilities to multiple folds. Intrigued? Follow the link at:http://smartdatacollective.com/keith-peterson/322401/solving-supply-chain-risks-infographic

Internet of Things (IoT) helps in transfer of data over a network without human interaction and this is one of the major sources of Big Data. Tom Davenport, independent senior advisor to Deloitte Analytics agrees that even though the concept of IoT implies that the most important feature of sensors is their connectedness but in order to analyze the data generated and use it for efficient action, analytics is required. This has been referred as the “Analytics of Thing” by him. Compiling data from devices and comparing them across time for achieving best results is one of the principal advantages. Utilizing data to optimize processes, identifying maintenance problems, diagnose anomalies and identifying reason for variations are other things that can be included in the Analytics of Things. Davenport suggests that companies that have to work with fast paced data and have relatively less experience with sensor analytics should invest in The Analytics of Things. Read more at: http://www.tibco.com/blog/2015/05/20/moving-from-the-internet-of-things-to-the-analytics-of-things/

Data analysis conventionally involves a series of process of collecting data from several sources and then analyzing them after some time. Normally these data come with a expiry time i.e. there is a specific short time by which these data needs to be analyzed, processed and utilized. With development in IT world we can no longer wait for data to be collected and then analyzed and processed. The need of the moment is to shift the Big Data nearer to the data source. Thus the value obtained from the data is more important than the way it is collected. Read more at: http://www.tibco.com/blog/2015/04/14/data-analytics-how-to-be-advanced-pervasive-and-invisible/

The success mantra for a perfect digital strategy is to deliver the right message (RM) to right person (RP) at the right time (RT). But we are often overwhelmed by popular trends and forget to look beyond them. Here is an inventory of strategies one can follow to find an optimal solution (might not be the trendiest one). Avinash Kaushik (author) in his blog Occam’s Razor talks about the 5 myths of digital marketing and analytic:

• Programmatic Platforms are a panacea.
• A data first strategy is a winning formula.
• All we need is Facebook, forget our websites.
• The web is dead. Mobile web is dead. Apps are the past present and future.
• Cookies! Cookies are all we need.

For more insight into this piece don’t hesitate to follow http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-analytics-deadly-myths-de-mythified/

At Paris Air Show 2015, Bombardier plans to bring its CSeries jetliner that carries Pratt & Whitney’s Geared Turbo Fan (GTF) engine which uses great swathes of data. But data created by industrial equipment such as jet engines, gas turbines and MRI machines has more potential business value on a size-adjusted basis which makes it valuable than other types of big data being generated from the social web, consumer Internet and other sources. Finally, the Internet of Things is helping manufacturers manage their Pay by Hour engagement models and long term maintenance contracts at lower costs. With rapid advancements in the Internet of Things in aircrafts combined with data analytics, it’s truly exciting to work in the aerospace industry. Read more about this interesting article at:  http://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/7319-analytics-and-the-internet-of-things-in-aerospace