How to ensure big data delivers big insights

“Big data” may be an overhyped term, as overinflated expectations fail to deliver real-world outcomes. But the solution is simple, says Yardi Australia’s regional director, Terry Gowan.

More data was produced last year than in the entire history of human endeavour. By 2020, a mind-boggling 1.7 megabytes of new information will be generated each second for every human being on the planet.

Big data and analytics are rapidly becoming the lifeblood of any organisation. But market research giant Forrester predicts that 2018 will be the year when enterprises face up to the hard facts: that big data requires hard work.

“The truth about big data is it’s just lots of data,” Gowan says.

“Without the right tools to analyse the data, it’s impossible to gain the insights required to make better business decisions.

“If big data analysis doesn’t lead to a better customer experience, increased productivity or reduced costs, then why do it at all?”

The drivers are clearly compelling. KPMG’s Bridging the Gap report, published in November, found that data-driven decisions were enabling property companies to improve space utilisation, investment decision-making and competitor analysis.

But the real competitive advantage is in using data to improve customer service, the report found.

“With efficient and effective data analysis, landlords can respond quickly to their consumers’ rapidly changing needs and deliver superior service. Indeed, they can actually start to predict their consumers’ needs and respond to them before the consumer realises the need themselves. As property increasingly becomes more of a service than a product, this ability will be key to real estate organisations’ survival,” KMPG says.

The challenge for property companies is to ensure their “data lakes” – those vast repositories of enterprise-wide information that are collected each day – don’t become “data swamps”, Gowan says.

“Ensuring you have an error-free foundation to house your data is one thing. But having real-time access to meaningful, accurate metrics – and being able to make quick decisions based on those metrics – is something else.”

That’s why 2018 will be the year in which the property industry embraces the generation of business intelligence tools to “aggregate and visualise” the information stored in these data lakes, Gowan says.

He points to Yardi’s Orion Business Intelligence platform, which feature more than 200 built-in key performance indicators and powerful, flexible reports and dashboards.

“Property companies can access live statistical data on a dashboard in real time – and tens of millions of data points can be distilled down into one easy-to-understand graph. And they can get 24/7 access to key decision-making tools from any mobile device.”

As data-driven companies like Amazon are poised to shake up the Australian business landscape in 2018, harnessing the power of big data has never been more important, Gowan says.

And Yardi’s message is simple. “Big data? There is an app for that,” Gowan concludes.

Find out why Yardi was named in Forbes Cloud 100 for the second year in a row earlier in 2017. Visit www.yardi.com.au