It’s tempting to ignore the hype and hysteria about the ‘Big Data’ your organization’s likely collected in recent years, but few in finance can afford to stick their collective heads in the technology sand when it comes to the promised ROI of mining vast stores of unstructured data.

Estimates are that the rate of return on analytics investments is $10.66 on every dollar invested. Does that really mean that if you’re gathering data and you haven’t deployed big data analytics, you’re crazy?

Some people think so.

The problem appears to be selecting the data to be analyzed and figuring out, first and foremost, what questions you want it to answer.

Chances are you’ve got plenty of data to analyze. Estimates are that the amount of stored data in most organizations doubles every two years. That’s a lot of information.

And analyzing all of it would likely be not only impossible, but a vast waste of time and resources.

While there are plenty of business intelligence (BI) tools to do the job, it’s up to the strategic planners in finance and strategic planning to figure out what analysis is needed.

The process takes three broad steps: Start by asking what the company should be doing. Then figure out what data can be used toward the effort.

Then apply analytics.

A broad overview of the process has been assembled here.

Tags: big data, business intelligence, data, unstructured