KPMG's Gil Winters
CeBIT’s DataCon panel – Promise to Profit: Going Beyond the Data saw industry experts offering up their plays as to where the Big Data market is going over the next few years.
Panellists included Chris Carr from Commonwealth Bank, Jeff Carruthers from Resonate Solutions and Gil Winters from KPMG.
Winters believes that there will be some very big changes in the way data is collated, moving from simple binary data to more multimedia inputs. This will also change the way in which we value privacy. When dealing with customer experience analytics, he believes there will be 4 key innovations.
Firstly, data capture areas will utilise more cameras, facial and voice recognition technology, and collecting users MAC addresses.
“It sounds a bit Big Brother, which is a natural reaction, but we’re moving in that direction. Times will change,” he said.
Secondly, visualisations, and the manner in which we interact with data will change. Thirdly, the performance, scalability and cost will all be reduced by Cloud computing. More of this will be done in memory, without SQL. And finally, Winters believes machine learning will help analysts point the way.
He also believes there will be a movement away from simple pragmatic and academic concerns when looking at large sets of customer data, and into politics. There will be groups that are militant about privacy. On the other hand there will be those that take data collection with ‘growing comfort and acceptance’ looking to get the best deals or special deals from their sports teams, for example.
Carruthers believes that in the customer experience/feedback domain, data analytics will become more real time. He too agrees that personal privacy will be loosened, with more social media visualisation. He believes the next key move will be adding identity to data sets, that is, a human context.
“Consumers are getting more sophisticated about this stuff, some will be happy to trade, but will want something in return,” he said.
Consumers are already suffering from survey fatigue, so Big Data, combined with context will produce a more surgical, ‘deep dive’ analysis of consumers habits.
Carr agrees that ‘hypertargeting’ is “absolutely going to happen.”
“If we aren’t testing and learning from our hypertargeting, then we will lose out. People will turn off it if they don’t have the context required,” he said.
Carr also believes that analytics staff will soon need to basic coding as part of their core organisational skills. Grads know what they’re doing, but the rest of the market will need to upskill and get their hands dirty.
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Allan Swann is the ARN Editor at IDG Communications Australia. Follow Allan on Twitter @allanswann, and at Google+.
