In his recently published book, Think Bigger: Developing a Successful Big Data Strategy for Your Business, Mark van Rijmenam observes, “Big Data has the potential to benefit organizations in any industry in any location across the globe. Big Data is much more than just a lot of data, and combining different data sets will provide organizations with real insights that can be used in decision-making and to improve the financial position of the company.”

Here are eight generic use/benefits of Big Data:

1. Truly get to know your customers, all of them and in real time.
2. Co-create, improve, and innovate your products in real time.
3. Determine the nature and extent of risk that your organization faces.
4. Personalize your website and pricing in real time toward individual customers.
5. Improve your service support for customers.
Note: If you want them to become “evangelists,” this is the best way to achieve that.
6. Find new markets and new business opportunities by combining your own with public data.
7. Better understand your competitors and, more importantly, stay ahead of them.
8. Organize tour company’s operations much more effectively, and save money.

“Of course, these generic uses are just a small indication of the massive possibilities of Big Data, but it shows that Big Data provides endless opportunities to add business value and help you stand out from your competition. Each organization has different needs and will require a specific Big Data approach.”

He explains all this in much greater detail in the book. Please see Pages 98-103. Think Bigger was published by AMACOM (April 2014).

Mark van Rijmenam is founder of the online big data knowledge platform BigData-Startups.com, which aims to become the central point of big data on the web. BigData-Startups.com a platform with trends, best practices, information, open source tools and big data startups for organizations developing a big data strategy. The objective of the platform is to help organizations develop a big data strategy and to find the right big data technology vendor for that strategy. The platform attracts an important niche of consumers, job seekers, organizations and governments interested in big data. He lives in The Hague, Netherlands. To learn more about him and his work, please click here.