The Importance Of Big Data

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Attracting focus from firms in all industries, Big Data offers many benefits to those companies with the ability to harness its full potential. Firms using small data derive all of the data’s worth from its primary use, the purpose for which the data was initially collected. With Big Data, “data’s value shifts from its primary use towards its potential future uses” (Mayer-Schonberger & Cukier, 2013, p.99) thus leading to considerable increases in business efficiency. Employing Big Data analytics allows firms to increase their innovative capacity, and realize substantial cost reductions and time reductions. Moreover, Big Data techniques can be applied to support internal business decisions by identifying complex relationships within data. However, it is also important to recognize that much of Big Data’s value is “largely predicated on the public’s continued willingness to give data about themselves freely” (Brough, n.d., para. 11). As previously discussed, much of the content of Big Data is unstructured data from social media sites etc., and so if such data were to no longer be publically available due to regulation etc. the value of Big Data would be significantly diminished.

Unlocking Big Data’s Latent Value: Recycling Data
As the Big Data era advances, the significance of data is changing. In addition to supporting business decisions and transactions, data is often now the good being traded, as companies begin to grasp the seemingly boundless potential value inherent in the data itself. Decreasing storage costs combined with the ability to collect data passively (through technological progress) mean that many companies are finding it easier to justify preserving the data rather than discarding it once its primary function h...

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... etc. to customers and interact with them in real time, which can greatly impact customer loyalty. Again, time reductions represent a powerful benefit, and they are projected to increase with the continuous advancement of processing capabilities.
Evidently, there are many benefits to working with Big Data analytics and procedures, and as computing capabilities continue to advance these benefits are only projected to increase. Data’s value is now more dependent on its cumulative potential uses than its initial use; however it is unlikely that a single firm will be able to unlock all of the dormant value from a given dataset. Therefore, in order to maximize Big Data’s value firms can license their accumulated data to third parties in exchange for royalties. In doing so, all agents have incentive to maximize the value that can be extracted by means of re-using data.

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