Samsung uses it to power the content recommendation engine on its newest smart TVs. Progressive Insurance relies on it to capture driving behavior, determine cus-tomer risk profiles and decide on competitive pricing. LexisNexis Risk Solutions uses it to identify individuals, including family relationships, thus helping financial institutions and other clients reduce fraud.
It, of course, is Big Data—the mining and processing of petabytes’ worth of information to gain insights into customer behavior, supply chain efficiency and many other aspects of business performance. We say of course, because Big Data is hard to miss these days. Industry analysts and media observers hype it as the next big thing for every enterprise, and many companies have been rushing to climb on board. But is building an advanced analytics capability really worth the investment? Until now, data to answer that question has been scarce.