Thursday 12 September 2013

Big Data

What is common to a banker who intends to determine which of her customers are at a greater risk of account-takeover fraud and a retailer intending to reach out to a prospective customer who happens to be in the vicinity of the retail outlet? The answer lies in big data analytics. Big data is the buzz word today. The old idea of data residing in rows, columns, reports and purchase transactions is passé. The form of data has evolved and now, it also originates from tweets, videos, click streams, sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, cell phone GPS signals and various other unstructured sources.
IBM estimates that every day we generate 2.5 quintillion bytes (1018 bytes or 1000 petabytes) of data leading to creation in last two years itself, of 90% of all data available. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, took everyone by surprise in a conference in 2010 when he declared that we create as much data in two days now as we did from the dawn of civilization until 2003. Therefore, it is called as big data. Doug Laney of Gartner, Inc. defined big data as “high-volume, -velocity and –variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.” It promises to companies not just information, but insight. It provides an opportunity to unravel the mysteries in the past, present and future when explored using tools e.g. modeling, experimental design, prediction, optimization and simulation. For an organization, it translates into more objective yet speedy decision-making. Big data is already influencing the way companies approach customers. The outcomes are evident in the form of new concepts floating around as well as cases of profitable execution. For example, location based advertising (LBA) is rapidly gaining traction. LBA has gained significance due to use of social media and its features e.g. location. LBA allows focused marketing communication with specific reference to location. With rise in m-savvy customers and availability of technology to track, LBA is being pitched as one of the top high-value mobile services to achieve mass adoption.  Fraud detection is another area where big data is turning out to be of help. Ruchi Verma and SR Mani of Infosys reported a case wherein GE Consumer & Industrial Home Services Division saved about US $5.1 million in the first year of using SAS to detect fraudulent claims by unscrupulous service providers from within the organization.

Big data and analytics may not be inexpensive, but it is definitely proving to be cost-effective by resulting into insightful decisions. The companies which believe in engineering the future are gaining new insight through big data analytics and thereby, adding value to their processes and outputs vis-à-vis their stakeholders. 

-Dr. Manit Mishra
Assistant Professor
Marketing, IMI-B

Wednesday 4 September 2013

Looking back at those 2 months: Summer Experience with Tata Motors



Getting associated with an organization that stands for ethics, business-excellence and integrity was a reason enough for me to look forward to my 8 weeks of stay in the city of steel Jamshedpur,  the township of the Tata’s that houses the oldest mother plant of Tata Motors Limited.
 
Exploring the 580-odd acre plant of Tata Motors Jamshedpur plant in one-go was definitely not an easy task for anyone.  Hence, the first week was spent understanding the whole system of the organization – spending innumerable hours at the especially  dedicated Tata Management Centre that houses a huge library of many a journals, books and magazines.


After a week of careful analysis of the work- requirement  at  the  Jamshedpur  plant  of  the Tata Motors and considering my profile, I was drawn into the domain of Innovation Management that is handled by the HR department of the organization.

The project details were doled out. I was pretty excited to explore the whole scope of my assignment and immediately put on my thinking cap on how to go about the whole project since it was a whole new  field of research for me.

Experimenting  with  new  wor around’  and wanting to come out of my comfort zonewas my mind-frame.

The assignment mainly dealt with gauging the motivation levels of the work-force in the plant as regards to innovation, scanning the organizational climate with the lens of various innovation based frameworks being adopted by the company and hence gives suitable recommendations based on the need-gap analysis.

Cut to a certain flash-back : Tata’s had started an annual event titled Innovista’ way back in 2006 to reward and recognize the various innovative  products  rolled  out  in  the  various Tata Group of Companies with none other than Mr. Ratan Tata rewarding the winners himself at a gala function that takes place every year in Mumbai.  It  was  in  2009  that  the  innovation drive was decided to be adopted in the Jamshedpur plant of Tata Motors as a derivative of the main event. The theme being the same: rewarding  innovation  at various  levels  -  be it innovations at the preliminary stage, promising innovations or innovations that looked good on paper but somehow failed while execution.

Cut to week 3: I was already travelling across the huge plant-works in the shuttles deployed to  carry people  from one  division to  another within the plant meeting the various divisional innovation co-coordinators and gathering my data.

The fact that I came from an engineering background but having never worked in a typical engineering firm prior to this (due to my sudden twist of interest towards advertising) made the experience all the more intriguing for me. Regular reviews with my mentors and faculty member made me fine-tune my works and helped me maintain sustained motivation and encouragement.

My co-interns were a great source of learning reservoir for me, bringing diverse skills and interests to the fore-front and making my internship a truly enriching experience.

Cut to the D-Day: Reports were submitted. Presentations were given. A warm hand-shake of appreciation and acceptance of the set of recommendations I had given were reasons enough for me to take back a set of experience that was truly rewarding in every sense of the word. The equations and camaraderie I had forged with my mentors and co-interns will always be remembered.

To conclude, I would like to share these nuggets of  lessons  hidden  in  these  8  weeks  of  my
summer experience with the Tatas:  one must loo fo qualit projects   to   enhance   ones profile something that suits and interests them. One should also try to come out of the comfort zones sometimes and try to experiment and add extra dimensions to one’s profile in the initial stages (and maybe later as well) of ones career as a means of continuous learning exercise.



By:


  ISHAAN RATTANPAL

  PGDM-II (2012-14 Batch)
  
  IMI-Bhubaneswar