Big Data and Information systems

A lot has been written and published about the big data and Information system recently. In my opinion
big data is a game changing uprising that will change the way how information is used, accumulated and
managed, and therefore transforming our work style. So before moving ahead I would like to define,
what is big data and Information system? Big data is an extremely large data both structured and
unstructured which cannot be handled via traditional methods. It is a very wide term to represent large
and complex datasets. Forbes define the big data in twelve
different ways, but the gist of all explains the complexity
and enormity.
But the biggest
question remain
unanswered, what
qualify for big
data? The most
common
and
accepted way to
describe the big
data is via three
Vs- Volume, Velocity and Variety. Whereas Information system
can be defined as a system consisting of combination of people
and computers-hardware, software and infrastructure in order to
elucidate the information and utilize it in planning, control,
coordination and decision making in a company.

Before moving ahead lets discuss How Big Data is

classified? Big Data is classified broadly into three
categories, the record of human experiences is classified as
Human generated Big Data which includes data from
Social Media, Blogs, Internet Searches, user generated
maps etc. Whereas the data about the data is classified as
Metadata, It is computer generated, machine readable and
highly structured. It comprises of transactions, reference
tables and relationships. And lastly the data generated from
the small sensors to complex web machines can be
classified as Machine generated data. It is well structured,
increasing in volume every day and it has been estimated
that 95% of data has never been seen by human eyes. In
this 21st century the data is collected in a revolutionary
scale and here comes the biggest challenge: To extract the
relevant information from the vast ocean of data. Earlier decisions were based on estimations and
assumptions which can now be analyzed with the help of mathematical models that can be developed
using this enormous data.
Creating value from big data involves various phases
like acquiring the data, extracting information, data
integration, transforming into models & analyzing them,
and their result interpretation and development. As
shown in the figure that an organizations success
depends upon the successful integration of strategy,
culture and technology. Big data, if utilized properly can
help in transforming businesses as it plays a vital role in
expanding the customer intelligence, improving the
operational efficiencies, generating new business
processes and integrating big data and analytics and
providing them as a service. It is also used in predictive
marketing where big data can be a very useful asset in
deciding the target audience for a product to be
launched. It also helps in analyzing customer behavior, digging demographic information and chasing
their purchasing traits. Big data plays an important role in Fraud detection which helps in tracing the point
of sale, geological location, IP address etc.
This clearly indicates that none of the business sectors are left untouched with the impact of Big Data.
While there are many ways to divide the computer information system, but the most practical one is view
it from the user point of view. User accesses the information in various ways like retrieval of data items
that are isolated, Carrying ad hoc analysis of data files using a mechanism & generating standard reports
that contains prespecified aggregations of data. These days decisions are proposed and outcomes are
calculated of the proposed decision using the information. Some examples of information systems are

data warehouses, office automation, enterprise, resource planning, expert systems, geographic
information system, search engines, global information system and many more.
As big data is utilized into the enterprise, data innovation (IT) specialists and business supports will
knock up against various challenges that must be addressed before any huge information system can be
fruitful. One of the challenges that big data faces is Scale; big data can be scaled up elastically and
rapidly wherever and whenever across cloud or data center but few big data solutions like MongoDB,
NOSQL have scaling limitations. This gives rise to another challenge that big data faces is Performance;
in this social online world, delays of nanoseconds can cost high losses so big data needs to maintain high
speed no matter how they are scaled or the amount of workload our database systems perform.
When we talk about 24/7 business applications that generate revenue relying on big data needs to have
high availability. Continuous availability is another major challenge of big data. Organizations cannot
afford data access to go down. Data Security is one of the key issues of discussion and next major hurdle
big data is facing. Big data contains risky and sensitive data which needs to be secure but todays big data
trending solutions like NoSQL, MongoDB lack enough security mechanisms. Lastly Cost, which is
directly involved at each and every step of implementing big data solutions. As the emergence of big data
has opened new technological foundations, Information Systems also play a key role in organizing a
business today.
Information systems help organizations achieve targeted goals like excellence in the operations,
introduction and marketing of the product and service, better decision making and day to day activities.
Information system alters the raw data into useful information. Talking in terms of business, Information
systems provides solution to a problem or challenge a firm is facing and provides them real economic
business value.
New technologies have augmented organizations efficiency and has provided them with a competitive
edge. The increase in information system complexity, however, leads to many challenges. There are new
strategies, requirements, business initiatives that multinational corporations, public organizations, and
nonprofits need to deduce and apply. There are tradeoffs in the resources that are required, benefits &
costs, priorities, level of risks and appetite, and the capability of an organization to imbibe the change.
The question here arises; How these issues should be governed and managed? The overall complexities
of information systems are amplified when cyber security and data privacy are included. There are
varying maturity levels in the organizations with regards to the ability to make an intentional decision,
result measures, apply required levels of investment and govern these transactions, while securing the
assets and protecting personal and financial information.
It has been over a decade theres been a massive explosion of generated and retained data. Data science is
a one of the popular techniques used for extracting knowledge from bulk of data. Data Science is an
integration of broad knowledge areas including data analysis, modelling/statistics and
engineering/prototyping. The phenomenal thing about data science is you can do multiple things & can do
them together, and its challenging too. Extracting value from big data remains a hurdle and is similar in
many ways to the previous problem of amending business intelligence from transactional data. The
procedure helps in extracting data from various sources, transforming it to fit our analytical needs, and
then load it into a data warehouse for subsequent analysis, commonly known as Extract, Transform &
Load. It supports integration across operational data stores, BI platforms, transactional systems, cloud,
and Hadoop platforms.
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The technology foundations that help in relating Big Data to the broader Information Management
domain are No-SQL and Apache Hadoop. The commercially dominant Big data technology, No-SQL
databases are integrated in real-time event detection process which is deployed to inbound channels
implement technology behind analytical capabilities. It has a flexible model where query emergence is
from the data in the scope, rather than being fixed by the developer in advance. Whereas Hadoop is a
software framework that facilitates data intensive distributed applications. Two major components of
Hadoop framework are MapReduce & Hadoop distributed file system.
MapReduce allows analysis to be transferred to the data that lies in highly scalable and distributed
manner, and the Hadoop system consists of wide range of tools that streamline the analysis or generally
manage the data. These tools enable creation of MapReduce programs which are then executed on top of
HDFS. There are variety of analysis tools available depending on the need like Apache Pig for high level
scripting language, Apache Mahout for data mining etc. The iterative nature of Big Data analysis provides
more freedom than traditionally be the case in Information Management.
Big data transform information systems as we move away from traditional RDBMS. The three Vs of big
data have brought change in leaving traditional retrieval and storage methods of RDBMS to databases
like NoSQL. NoSQL stores without parsing or categorizing the data upon system entry. Information
systems these days lack efficiency in handling large structured & unstructured data .The velocity with
which data is exploding, in near future information systems should have capability of processing huge
amount of real time data. Processing sensor data and data collected from social media are best examples
of real time processing.
Information systems have to be more advanced in coming time so as to support in memory data analytics
& predictive analytics. Lastly most of the data are either user generated or machine, unlike few years back
when usually the data was driven in the firewall of a corporation noticing every bits of data coming in and
going out. This in turn will fundamentally transform information systems architecture.Data Visualization
is also a fundamental concept associated with information systems. It is the presentation of information in
a pictorial or graphical arrangement. For quite a long time, individuals have relied on upon visual
representations, for example, graphs and maps to comprehend data all the more effectively and rapidly.
Most information is gathered and broke down, analysts takeaway data visualization as a technique that
empowers them to see systematic results displayed outwardly, discover significance among the a huge
number of variables, impart ideas and theories to others, and even foresee what's to come.
As a result of the way the human mind forms data, it is quicker for individuals to handle the significance
of numerous information focuses when they are shown in outlines and diagrams as opposed to poring
over heaps of spreadsheets or perusing pages and pages of reports. SAS, R etc. are examples of data
visualization tools another key aspect that comes from information systems is Business Analytics. It
means the abilities, innovations, hones for constant iterative investigation and examination of past
business execution to pick up understanding and drive business planning. Business analytics concentrates
on growing new bits of knowledge and comprehension of business performance in light of information
and measurable systems. There are two types on analytics descriptive and predictive which helps us in
forecasting from the data and generating facts and figures based on which we make a decision.
Big data has opened new doors in terms of technological advancements but here arises a big question of
Having rich data and poor information is a problem or an opportunity? The barrage of data is a huge
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benefaction to the corporate sector if they can unleash the potential of Big Data using predictive analytics.
Volume, velocity and variety characterize data but on the other hand real time analysis, prediction and
taking corrective measures is equally important. The actual value of big data is when its insights are used
for corrective measures and business advancements rather than just storing historical stuff. Over the years
data driven organizations have been hassling with just what to do with the collected data and finding a
matching fit into relational databases such as weblogs and texts. Big Data unlocks the hidden potential of
data and opens pathways for value aggregation such as integration of sentiment data and social network
with shopping trends to form customer insight.
Management of big data can be done by downloading tools for free and cost low, clustered commodity
hardware, this necessarily doesnt equate cutting cost of owning per TB of data. Factorization of
nonfunctional requirements equally important for commercial reality like recovery and backup, 24 /7
Enterprise Support infrastructure, business continuity, security, support patching etc. which are
considered as integral part of your information management infrastructure. To ensure profits the
additional potential insights offered by Big Data companies must have keen observation while combining
Big Data with relevant investment in Big Execution and Big Insight.
References:
1. Data Science Central, Data Veracity
http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/data-veracity
2. Harvard Business Review, November 01, 1976, How Effective Managers Use Information Systems,
retrieved from
https://hbr.org/1976/11/how-effective-managers-use-information-systems3. BizRuntime IT Services, Image retrieved from
http://www.bizruntime.com/bigdata.html
4. Challenges of Big Data in History. (2013). Big Data in History. Retrieved May 10, 2015, from
http://www.sas.com/resources/asset/five-big-data-challenges-article.pdf
5. Http://www.ijalel.org/pdf/573.pdf. (2014). IJALEL International Journal of Applied Linguistics &
English Literature. Retrieved from
http://www.mahmoudyoussef.com/aagsb/mba/mis/Lectures-2-and-3-Questions.pdf
6. IT Professional Conference, Challenges in Information Systems. Retrieved from
http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/it-professional-conference.cfm
7. DataStax, Big Data Challenges, retrieved from
http://www.datastax.com/big-data-challenges
8. DataScienceBerkeley, Berkeley school of information, What is Data Science? Retrieved from
http://datascience.berkeley.edu/about/what-is-data-science/
9. Sashi Reddi, 4 Ways Big Data Will Transform Business retrieved from
http://www.csc.com/big_data/publications/89362/964774_ways_big_data_will_transform_business
10. Prof. Dr. M. Jarke, Informatik 5 Information Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Big Data & Model
Management retrieved from:
http://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/cms/research/MM
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11. Information Systems and Data Management, The University of Queensland retrieved from
http://www.uq.edu.au/research/research-at-uq/information-systems-and-data-management
12. Blog on Big Data and Analytics, 5 Ways Big Data Are Fundamentally Changing Information Systems
retrieved from:
http://hkotadia.com/archives/5263
13. An Oracle White Paper (February 2013) Information Management and Big Data A Reference
Architecture retrieved from
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/entarch/articles/info-mgmt-big-data-ref-arch-1902853.pdf
14. B. Franks, Taming the Big Data Tidal Wave: Finding Opportunities in Huge Data Streams with
Advanced Analytics, 1st Edition, Wiley, 2012, Hoboken, New Jersey

15. Data Visualization: What it is and why it's important retrieved from
http://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/big-data/data-visualization.html