“At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right” - Miguel de Unamuno

I have complained from time to time about the excessive hype and the deceits posited in the name of the mega-trend-setting Big Data phenomenon, and the dearth of coherent, cohesive and verifiable stories that one might expect to find in support of wonderful claims of Big Data insight, consummate brilliance and magnificently unprecedented benefits.

Therefore, I welcomed the chance to read some of the latest use cases and success stories that are doing the rounds on the Big Data, Big Data Analytics and Hadoop 'ecosystem' circuit. Needless to say, I was amazed by some of the stories.

Without further ado, I would like to briefly mention three of these success stories, and comment on why I think they are just so amazing.

A Basket of Big Data Cases

Case #1 - A bank that correlates individual purchase transactions, customer profile data and customer social-media site activity (such as Facebook 'likes') and increases revenue opportunities as a result.

Benefits cited - The bank was able to correlate and analyse disparate data sets in order to drive the provision of unsolicited credit cards and are able to offer special promotions based on this analysis of customer data. Best of all, new customer acquisition costs slashed by almost a third.

Why this is so amazing? - The fact that a bank can accurately correlate so much customer information, and especially from non-traditional social media sites, into one cohesive and revenue enhancing whole is amazingly unbelievable. If this use case is actually true then it's a worrying issue of privacy. If it's not true, then it's just another Big Data red-herring in the hype cycle. What is also amazing about this success fairy-tale is that half-way through the plot the focus switched from customer retention and upselling to customer acquisition. Which, to put it politely, is rather incongruous.

Case #2 – Big Data technology used for Data Warehouse optimisation.

Benefits cited - There are quite a few claimed for this little one:

It removes delays inherent in Enterprise Data Warehouse operational reporting.

It removes the prohibitive costs and limitations of traditional Enterprise Data Warehousing.

Offloads the most challenging data management and analytics activities to new technologies and management approaches designed to handle them.

Cuts the costs of data preparation and cleansing.

Reduces time to insight by offloading the most time-consuming analytical tasks.

Supports a variety of new data types, especially unstructured data.

Better management of rapidly growing log, sensor and other unstructured data.

Why this is so amazing? – It's amazing not because it possibly isn't true, but because of the incredible audacity, brilliant disingenuousness and the dazzling artificiality of the collection of reasons in support of yet another claim that Big Data technology is taking over not just the old EDW tech stacks, but the whole Data Warehouse enchilada itself.

Case #3 – Big Data aids the understanding of the behaviour, tendencies and bias of the wealthiest banking clients.

Benefits cited – By first identifying wealthiest banking clients, and then by collecting all data and information on them, whether from operational systems, social media or dark pools of data, it helps the bank to formulate and offer their top clients additional products and services that could also be of interest.

Why this is so amazing? – Seriously, this is so amazing that it beggars belief. If the Customer Relationship executives looking after the prime accounts of the wealthiest customers need Big Data Analytics and social-media-sniffing to understand their top clients, then the bank is taking a seriously amazing approach. Now call me an old-fashioned cynic, but obviously, these types of Big Data success stories are made up by people who really don't understand the financial sector or the way that the wealthiest of the banking clients 'interact' with their financial service providers. Now that's truly amazing.

That's all folks

Of course, there are many more 'amazing' Big Data success stories just waiting to be analysed, but I think these three examples cited here are enough to go on for the moment.

I'll just finish with this fabulous quote from Gabriel García Márquez. “Fiction was invented the day Jonah arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale...”

Many thanks for reading.

As always, please share your questions, views and criticisms on this piece using the comment box below. I frequently write about strategy, organisational leadership and information technology topics, trends and tendencies. You are more than welcome to keep up with my posts by clicking the ‘Follow’ link and perhaps even send me a LinkedIn invite. Also feel free to connect via Twitter, Facebook and the Cambriano Energy website.

For more on this and other topics, check out my other recent posts:

#BigData #BigDataAnalytics #Decency #Ethics