Big Data to lose its sheen in 2014

Analytics and big data are undoubtedly the buzz words of the year. Analytics has been influencing every aspect of business in both, traditional and non-traditional, sectors across the world this past year. Jigsaw Academy, a world renowned analytics training academy, has come up with a set of predictions for the analytics industry in 2014. What are the new innovations and tools that will hit the industry this year? Will analytics still continue to influence and dominate business decisions?

Commenting on the trends, Mr. Gaurav Vohra, CEO, Jigsaw Academy said, “Despite big data losing its sheen, analytics will still continue to be the mainstay of an organization. Analyzing large data sets will increasingly become a source of competitive advantage for organizations. More and more businesses need help with the volume, variety and velocity of Big Data to make data driven decisions”

Some of the interesting predictions are mentioned below:

The hype around big data will hit a slump – The adoption of Big Data in India is currently very low. The corresponding hype however, is a lot more. The Big Data bubble is at the peak of its hype right now and some time towards the end of 2014, Big Data will start to lose its sheen.

Online businesses to focus more on analytics - There has been an explosive growth in India in the e-commerce segment. In 2014, as competition increases, online businesses will start focusing on using analytics as a way to enhance their competitive differentiation. Only those businesses that are able to set up a culture of data driven decision making can hope to stay ahead of the competition.

Social media analytics to become an integral part of business – Data specialists add value to virtually every department within an organization. In sales, they can analyze past and current sales to predict future demand, determine pockets of heavy demand and areas with high potential to target customers well. In the marketing department, they can analyze social media trends, effectiveness of campaigns and optimize return on investment for different marketing media used.

More and more businesses are leveraging social media to connect with their customers. In 2014, organizations will begin to derive significant insights from their customers through social media analytics. Techniques like text analytics and sentiment analysis will also gain credence. FMCG companies and media houses (especially TV channels) are going all out to promote themselves on the social media platform and they will need the application of analytics in this domain to assess their target audience.

The demand for analytics training will continue to increase –There is a massive amount of information being generated every day. According to one research, 4 exabytes of new information was generated in 2008 – more than the previous 5000 years combined! This exponential growth of data has led to a massive surge in data specialist jobs. People are needed to clean this raw data, analyse it and make it usable. Even the most sophisticated data analyses tools present today, which use artificial intelligence and neural networks can’t make sense of this vast raw data, hence the high demand for data specialists is very likely to prevail for decades to come.

Demand for analytics is currently driven by businesses and organizations that want to up-skill their employees. In 2014, MBA colleges will place more emphasis on analytics which will become a part of the regular curriculum. A number of specialized analytics courses (such as the ones offered by Great Lakes Management College as well as ISB, Hyderabad) have already gained popularity in 2013. Jigsaw predicts that many more such courses will be launched in 2014.

Salary packages for big data and analytics professionals will continue to remain on an upward trajectory – As years pass and more and more data is generated, jobs in all fields of analytics will be abundant. To handle the complexity, numerous firms will open and specialize in different stages of the process – some to fetch the data, some to clean it, some to use the sophisticated tools to get trends, and some top level consultancies to make sense of these trends and provide actionable insights while others to develop the necessary tools; thus creating lots of jobs. Salaries in the analytics industry have been increasing faster than the average for the last 10 years. This trend is set to continue in 2014 as well. Entry level salaries will grow by 5 to 10% and salaries for those with 5+ years of experience will grow by 10 to 15%.