Data in today’s world, means a lot to people and their lives as such. Data represents the raw information (dimensions and facts, in technical terms)
related to a particular task or an activity obtained from various sources which helps the user to summarize an event, to provide meaningful information
and to derive at a particular decision or a conclusion. People have become increasingly dependent on the data provided by many sources, that whatever
decision they take up in their lives be it purchasing a furniture or a high end car in the market, depend on the data that support their decision. Thanks to
the advent of internet tools which allow people to make informed decisions hassle free. If the word “data†is put under search in Google Ngram viewer
we could observe that more and more people have incorporated data in their decision making processes.
Data has enormous potential for analyzing what has happened in the past, what is currently happening (including minute to minute updates) and what is
gonna happen in the future. What Oren Etzioni was able to do in 2003 is a classic example of the power of intelligent usage of data and its hidden
potential. He published a paper “To buy or Not to buy - Mining Airfare Data to Minimize Ticket Purchase Price†which could help people when to
buy an air ticket at the lowest price in a time period. Microsoft immediately acquired the idea and the website and the idea is now part of Bing Travel.
What our own Raghuram G.Rajan was able to predict in 2005 about the then impending Economic Crisis is also an example of the uncanny ability to
unlock patterns which form part of the real world.
Just as people started using data, companies also started doing so and benefited by retrieving efficient results in their businesses. Today a number of
software packages are available to suit the needs of companies of all sizes. And the way data has been collected, stored, analyzed and presented has
changed throughout the years making the power of data and information inevitable for running even smaller businesses. Technologies
have improved so much that companies are switching over from small ETL (Extract - Transform - Load) packages to complex ERPs
(Enterprise Resource Planning) softwares and Big Data tools like Hadoop, unmindful of the costs involved, just because of the fact that meaningful
information processing is critical for their revenue and business models. It is imperative that behind every companies’ move to take any decision in
their day to day or long term operations, there is enough data to support the same. This is quite evident from the number of IT service solutions
companies burgeoning every day helping multi-national corporations of all verticals to perform efficiently.
Thus decision making till some time back was an art, but now it is becoming a science which every company is trying to master at with the help of
data. And in this competitive environment where businesses are fast paced, dynamic and ever-expanding it is of paramount importance that data driven
decision making should be part of any business to operate, expand and flourish.
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