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Greg Breazile: “Data is no good unless you can discover it, understand it and do something about it.”
Greg Breazile: “Data is no good unless you can discover it, understand it and do something about it.”

Businesses dedicate day to Big Data

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Imagine if the Springfield Cardinals knew exactly what professionals were most likely to buy suites for the upcoming baseball season.  

Proponents of big data say analytic software could be a game changer for more targeted sales pitches at Hammons Field and for other businesses across the region. Attendees of the March 17 Big Data Dance forum at The eFactory performed an exercise with the Cardinals as a hypothetical example to help identify top sales prospects based on analytics such as industry, job title and physical location.

In an age of cyberattacks, digital monitoring systems, online demographics and Web cookies, big data has become a buzz term members of the business community want to learn more about.

“Data is no good unless you can discover it, understand it and do something about it,” said Greg Breazile, a Marine colonel who works with Defense Department data and delivered a keynote address to the Springfield forum.

Big data broadly describes large, complex data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns in human behavior. Harvesting those patterns for commercial purposes is often too tall a task for traditional databases, but recent technological advances are creating new possibilities to today’s business professionals.

“Life is a set of complex systems. With big data, we can simplify the complex,” added Breazile, director of the Defense Department’s Command and Control and Cyber and Electronic Warfare Integration divisions.

Organized by Missouri State University’s Management Development Institute, about 65 attendees were on hand to soak up the science of data trends through the daylong series of presentations and workshops, said MDI Assistant Director Jeff Schmedeke. Among the 23 analytics experts presenting at the inaugural Big Data Dance were representatives from IBM, Cisco Systems, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Jack Henry & Associates Inc., BKD LLP, DeWitt & Associates Inc. and other corporations.

Big data for small business
In a breakout session for small businesses, Josie Bock of Springfield-based Essentially Data LLC presented to about a dozen people on how big data can foster predictive modeling.

Through such websites as Esri.com and ArcGIS.com, real estate agents, bankers and others can take advantage of free tools to better inform business decisions.

For example, Bock said a liquor retailer could go to Esri.com and create a map that inputs the store locations against a backdrop of areas in the city where alcohol sales are highest based on census figures or other sources. Such a map could inform where the owner opens a new store.

From determining political voting patterns to the density of manufacturers within a given area, analysts say big data has deep applications.

“It’s very important as small businesses to look at how we can utilize this data to improve customer engagement, gain efficiencies in processing requests, streamline internal processes and even develop information tailored to our customers’ needs,” Bock said.

Eric Chambers of marketing consultancy Torrent Consulting was one of the presenters in the small-business workshop. He said several companies, such as Marketo, ExactTarget and HubSpot, have automated software designed to help business operators be more targeted in their approaches.

“All customers are not created equally. Some customers are more valuable than others because they have the capacity to spend more than others,” Chambers said during the mock exercise to identify top prospects to buy Springfield Cardinals’ suites.

An insurance agency, for example, could determine where website visitors come from, what products they look at and purchase, if they are searching from a mobile device and what time of day they logged on the site.

All of those data sets provide clues to how that agency could attract its next customer, said Chambers, a small-business consulting manager in the Springfield office for Michigan-based Torrent Consulting.

“Some of these tools really give you creepy levels of data,” Chambers said. “HubSpot is one that is awesome, but it will give you a screen pop-up when one of your prospects is on your website and what page (he or she) is looking at. And you could click to call them right then.”

More than marketing
Dennis Hebbard, a big data and analytics specialist for IBM, hosted an afternoon forum examining how industries such as banking, automotive and retail can lean on big data to create efficiencies.

He said IBM worked with Luxottica Group, an operator of 7,000 eyewear stores such as LensCrafters and Sunglass Hut, to bring together market data collected systemwide. Representing 27 brands, company officials learned their online customers spent 20 percent more on purchases than those visiting brick-and-mortar stores. That led Luxottica to develop new marketing strategies.

Hebbard said for every broad marketing campaign before, Luxottica now has five more direct campaigns today, resulting in an incremental revenue increase of 4 percent for comparable periods.

Data analytics also can play a big role in cybersecurity.

For banks and financial institutions, Hebbard said the average security breach in 2014 resulted in company losses of $3.5 million, according to research by the Ponemon Institute.

“At the end of October, IBM released a big market study where they interviewed a bunch of chief security officers around the country, and 61 percent of those guys and gals believed that their defense mechanisms were dragging behind the hackers’ skills,” Hebbard said. “So, (business operators) are looking for very flexible data-analytic platforms to be able to move with a lot of agility.”

Hebbard cited Apache’s Hadoop, an IBM-supported open-source software that serves as a filing system for large data sets across clusters of commodity servers, as a solution for preventing security breaches. The server clusters provide resiliency because the software detects and addresses failures at the application level.

Elizabeth Rozell, a management professor and associate dean at the MSU College of Business, said big data is nothing new, but the recent buzz has prompted the school recently to hire two new analytics professors in the computer information systems department.

She said MSU already had professors well versed in big data, but analytics are trending and the school wants to be on the cutting edge.

“In our MBA and undergraduate programs, we want our students to have experience in big data, so we are trying to infuse that into our curriculum,” she said. “Students need to be aware of the tools that are out there to make sense of this data. And it’s not just about knowing the resources; you have to have the business acumen to look at the results and determine what they tell you.”

Kathy Holt, an executive vice president with Community Financial Credit Union, attended the small-business group forum and found it informative, if not daunting.

“It’s a bit overwhelming,” she said, “but necessary to start getting into.”[[In-content Ad]]

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