How to get big data breakthroughs

How to get big data breakthroughsHarnessing the power of big data isn’t just about number crunching, says EY’s managing partner for Oceania Real Estate and Construction, Selina Short. It demands innovative thinking and a new approach to the customer.Big data: Beyond the buzzword is the first in a series of EY white papers to outline the transformative trends in the property sector. Short (pictured) says the property industry is sitting at the lower end on what she calls the “big data maturity curve” but moving at pace to better understand the opportunities. This journey leads to an entirely new way of thinking about business, organisational culture and the customer.Big data, which has been hailed as the “oil of the future”, is about harvesting information from multiple sources and analysing it to uncover insights that lead to better business outcomes.”At the moment, the big data proposition is in its infancy for property companies,” Short says.The secret is to adopt what Short calls ‘hypothesis thinking’. “Ask an age-old question and use big data to answer that question.”She points to the work of construction giant Laing O’Rourke, which is using big data to test the hardening of newly-laid road surface using satellite mapping and sensors on heavy trucks. Andrew Harris, head of Laing O’Rourke’s innovation lab EnEx.G, estimates his team’s innovative approach has the potential to deliver a 20 per cent saving in time on a $5 billion project.”It’s exciting to see that something as basic as building a road can evolve with the Internet of Things, sensors and data,” Short says.”It shows how traditional approaches can be transformed with big data – but only when you are prepared to innovate.”Short says applying big data also requires a shift to customer-centric thinking. “We need to move away from our focus on the asset, and towards the user of the space,” she says. Examining the end-to-end customer journey of the people who work in an office, live in an apartment, shop at a retail centre or inhabit a precinct creates “new, exciting and challenging questions” about a company’s growth strategy, Short argues.EY’s report quotes the chief executive officer of Tishman Speyer, which has assembled a property portfolio of roughly $110 billion. Rob Speyer says his company’s “most important job” is to serve the 2,000 people who work in its buildings. “Instead of defining ourselves by the square feet we own, we will define ourselves by the quarter million people who use the square feet and how well we tend to them,” Speyer has said.Amazon is a good example of how global leaders are using data to “know what your customer wants before they know themselves,” Short explains.”The industry’s leaders are thinking about and mapping customer journeys to identify pain points and missed opportunities – and they are doing it by using big data to measure, analyse, experiment and fine-tune experiences in real time.”Companies may want to use big data, but this must go hand-in-glove with an innovation culture and a customer-centric mindset. Without these, the big data insights won’t lead to real world results,” she adds.It’s a lot to ask the industry to make these sizeable shifts simultaneously, Short warns.”A lot of companies in Australia’s property industry are innovative, and many are customer-centric, and some are using big data – but leveraging big data, building an agile culture and thinking about the full customer journey at the same time is quite a challenge. “But that’s what the industry must do to stay ahead of the curve.”Download EY’s white paper Big data: Beyond the buzzword.