How retailers can face the "Big Data Era"
When the "Internet of Things" and "Cloud Computing" are still not clearly understood, a new term - "Big Data" - has emerged. The new term - "big data", these IT terms are just concepts, or are they directly related to the business environment in which we live? The author believes that most retail practitioners are unable to respond clearly.
First of all, we need to understand that the essence of business behavior is what? It is that a business identifies and explores customer needs and provides valuable services to fulfill them. The best business behavior is for a company to exceed customer needs by providing different forms of services, so that the customer's feeling of value for money continues; such business behavior will be able to obtain higher and sustained profits.
The Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Computing, or Big Data are all tools that help us identify and tap into customer needs, and provide fast and accurate market data to enable customers to make timely decisions. The Internet, Cloud Computing or Big Data are all tools that help us identify and tap into customer needs and provide fast and accurate market data for timely decision making. Compared with traditional tools, they are more efficient, lower cost and more accurate. The author believes that as a practitioner in the field of business information, you can not need to know too much about its inner core technology and the way, but they can give retail users and the industry to bring what changes or trends are we can not ignore.
In 2008, Jack Ma successfully predicted the economic crisis and helped thousands of small manufacturers prepare food for the winter. The move earned Jack Ma high honors in the industry and brought Alibaba a steady stream of customers. How did Jack Ma do all these things? It was "Big Data" that inspired him. Jack Ma's predictions for the future are based on the analysis of user behavior. Generally speaking, buyers will compare products from multiple suppliers before purchasing them. This reaction to Alibaba's statistics, that is, the number of query clicks and the number of purchase clicks will maintain a relative value, integrated data from various latitudes to establish a user behavior model. Because of the huge sample size of Taobao users, thus ensuring the accuracy of the user behavior model. "Big data" for Alibaba clearly predicted user demand and market changes.
What is Big Data
I believe that Jack Ma's case has given us some insight.
So what is "big data"? When it comes to big data, it is inseparable from the relationship between the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing. The Internet of Things, cloud computing and big data is actually inseparable from the three major technologies, can not be isolated; the rapid development of the Internet of Things for big data to provide a wide range of data sources, cloud computing for the birth of big data to create a basic environment, away from the Internet of Things and cloud computing level, there is no big data the existence of the great value.
From the perspective of data, the Internet of Things is merely a source or a way of carrying data, which we can simply consider as a simpler and more effective terminal way of collecting information and data.
Cloud computing is a new IT business model, which is characterized by providing extremely low cost, extremely fast means of delivery, extremely simple to use, and making the synergy of the various associated systems exceptionally simple and easy. The booming development of cloud computing has objectively opened the door to the era of big data. If the highway is used to describe the analogy of cloud computing, then big data is the goods in all the cars. Cloud computing provides storage space, access channels and computing power for big data. Big data is the soul of cloud computing.
Big data technology is simply the ability to quickly obtain valuable information from various types of data; in the Internet era, our data is not only traditional structured data, unstructured data, semi-structured data began to take up most of the content of our data, and we find valuable information from it, has become not so easy. The development of big data technology is starting to make the solution to these problems easy.
We can clearly see that the smart business we mentioned is impossible to realize without big data, and the familiar business intelligence is a ludicrous concept without big data.
Big data has four major characteristics: first, the volume of data is huge, jumping from TB to the PB level; second, the data type is rich, including logs, video, audio, pictures, geographic information, documents, etc.; third, the data value of the low density of the video data as an example, a video of more than an hour of video, there may be less than three seconds of valuable information; fourth, the fast speed of data processing to reach the second extreme The first is the need to be able to access valuable data in real time.
These are all concepts and characteristics of big data, and returning to our actual business behavior, what benefits can big data bring us?
In the past, when we made business judgments, we mostly relied on our experience and intuition, so there would be judgments that weren't very certain or pathfinding situations where we took one step at a time. In the era of big data, many companies rely on data analysis to make the right decisions, which can bring great operational benefits to the company. The locations of flagship stores such as McDonald's, KFC, and Apple are all based on data analytics for accurate site selection. In the retail industry, the technology and means of data analysis are widely used, with traditional companies such as Walmart reshaping and optimizing their supply chains through data mining, and newly emerging e-commerce companies such as Amazon Prime and Taobao providing more specialized and personalized services to their users by mastering and analyzing massive amounts of data.
How can all kinds of enterprises cope with the development of the big data era
How can we face the big data era? The author believes that it can be divided into several steps to consider.
First of all, business leaders should pay attention to the development of big data, pay attention to the enterprise's data center, the collection of customer data as the first goal of the enterprise operation; second, the training of internal staff and the establishment of a mechanism to collect data; third, the business needs as a criterion to determine what data needs to be collected; fourth, to confirm that in the enterprise's existing data base or the future direction of the premise of how the first three goals of the infrastructure to be achieved. infrastructure program to achieve the first three goals.
After reading this, many people will think that these IT infrastructure work requires huge investment and a large information technology team, as China's largest business a part of the small and medium-sized micro-retailers can not or do not have enough ability to face such a change.
Medium-sized and large enterprises have been able to bear the cost of such a demand trend because of their own business and profit accumulation. Micro, small and medium-sized enterprises are still in the process of rapid development, if also as large and medium-sized enterprises to invest in all aspects of the new IT tools will soon be dragged down or suffered a serious injury. Fortunately, the development of IT provides equal options for all businesses, and the widespread use of cloud computing is a temporary gift for such a change. As small and medium-sized micro-retailers, there is no need to consider building their own IT system, they are not suitable in terms of energy, cost and capacity, so such enterprises can outsource the IT construction of the enterprise to the appropriate service provider, the enterprise itself all the energy into the development of the customer.
Amazon was the first in the world to launch the basic platform of cloud services for small and medium-sized micro-business enterprises to provide large enterprises and mega-corporations with the same basic environment and system architecture, small businesses only need to clearly plan their own goals and suitable steps after the use of cloud platforms on-demand payment can be made, there is no need for huge initial investment and unpredictable operating costs. At present, there have been a number of domestic small and medium-sized micro-retail enterprises to provide similar services to the information service providers, such as customer relationship management based on "XTOOLS", based on customer service "Xunbird" cloud call platform, based on the management of the chain store "Handyman" and so on. As for the small and medium-sized micro-enterprises how to choose their own development platform, you need to rely on the wisdom of the business leaders themselves.
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