Part I: The Fundamentals of Big Data

Chapter 1 Understanding Big Data

Chapter 2 Business Motivations and Drivers for Big Data Adoption

Chapter 3 Big Data Adoption and Planning Considerations

Chapter 4 Enterprise Technologies and Big Data Business Intelligence

Big Data has the ability to change the nature of a business. In fact, there are many firms whose sole existence is based upon their capability to generate insights that only Big Data can deliver. This first set of chapters covers the essentials of Big Data, primarily from a business perspective. Businesses need to understand that Big Data is not just about technology—it is also about how these technologies can propel an organization forward.

Part I has the following structure:

• Chapter 1 delivers insight into key concepts and terminology that define the very essence of Big Data and the promise it holds to deliver sophisticated business insights. The various characteristics that distinguish Big Data datasets are explained, as are definitions of the different types of data that can be subject to its analysis techniques.

• Chapter 2 seeks to answer the question of why businesses should be motivated to adopt Big Data as a consequence of underlying shifts in the marketplace and business world. Big Data is not a technology related to business transformation; instead, it enables innovation within an enterprise on the condition that the enterprise acts upon its insights.

• Chapter 3 shows that Big Data is not simply “business as usual,” and that the decision to adopt Big Data must take into account many business and technology considerations. This underscores the fact that Big Data opens an enterprise to external data influences that must be governed and managed. Likewise, the Big Data analytics lifecycle imposes distinct processing requirements.

• Chapter 4 examines current approaches to enterprise data warehousing and business intelligence. It then expands this notion to show that Big Data storage and analysis resources can be used in conjunction with corporate performance monitoring tools to broaden the analytic capabilities of the enterprise and deepen the insights delivered by Business Intelligence.

Big Data used correctly is part of a strategic initiative built upon the premise that the internal data within a business does not hold all the answers. In other words, Big Data is not simply about data management problems that can be solved with technology. It is about business problems whose solutions are enabled by technology that can support the analysis of Big Data datasets. For this reason, the business-focused discussion in Part I sets the stage for the technology-focused topics covered in Part II.