Big Data: Allowing IT to Show It’s More Relevant Than Ever

In years past, IT departments were the gatekeepers of innovation — the ones with the power to say No to new applications and solutions. Today, IT knows that to remain relevant it must now say Yes to find solutions to important business issues and drive innovation. So what’s making so many of them say No to Big Data projects?

Big data propels the innovation that businesses need by aggregating structured and unstructured data. It allows marketing departments to monitor social media comments to uncover breaking trends. It enables finance departments to quickly identify groups of customers who are likely to miss payments. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of big data’s capabilities.

But big data requires IT to leverage large volumes of both structured and unstructured data. Smart IT leaders don’t want to say No to projects because pulling together structured data and unstructured data is too difficult. They’ve seen legacy technology based on relational databases is hindering their ability to enter the big data era.

These older tools, while still useful for some purposes, were created before the boom of unstructured data when data was much more consistent and simple in format. But for unstructured data — which by its nature comes in many various shapes and formats — forcing it into highly structured formats would take unreasonable amounts of time. Presumably one reason so much unstructured data goes unused.

So how are top IT departments moving from No to Yes? By moving to the new generation. They’re using an Enterprise NoSQL database platform which provides a schema-agnostic approach that allows unstructured and structured data to be aggregated easily, facilitating the development of new products and services quickly.

There are many examples of IT departments having successfully delivered big data projects using MarkLogic, the only Enterprise NoSQL database platform. NBC developed the Saturday Night Live app that gives users a personalized experience as they view 40 years of shows. Tier-1 banks that created Operational Trade Stores streamlined their entire workflow processes enabling a single consistent view of all current and future derivatives.

These top IT departments that are leveraging the power of all of their data to say Yes to big data projects, are very relevant to their organization and driving the innovation the business needs. So what’s stopping you?