Group items tagged

"It's become mission critical to understand what is going on across the enterprise and why it is happening," Morgan-Vandome explained. "To make this a reality, each different line of business user needs to get a perspective of activity impacting all divisions." Nine out of 10 C-level retail executives reported that their organization is collecting and managing an average of 98% more business information than two years ago, according to a recent survey conducted by Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif. And the sources are ever-growing. For example, 43% of data stems from customer information, 33% from operations, and 30% sales and marketing, according to the survey.

The November 15 edition of Campus Technology includes the following second installment of a two-part series highlighting big data and examines how pioneering schools are mining big data in hopes of improving student learning and performance.  The article highlights multiple schools, including Oracle customer Arizona State University (ASU) which considers itself to be at the forefront of student data analytics.  The article notes that ASU was among the first universities in the country to build a data warehouse and maintains big data and Hadoop working groups.  The article includes comment by John Rome, deputy chief information officer (CIO) and business intelligence (BI) strategist, ASU, who notes that when ASU looks at outsourcing, they consider core versus context.  He also notes that ASU has already outsourced its email as well as the hosting of its ERP and LMS systems. He also notes that the university knows there are big opportunities in big data, and ASU fully intends to exploit them.

The November 1 edition of Campus Technology includes the following first installment of a two-part series highlighting big data and its potential for improving student learning and success.  The article notes that in higher education, big data may be seen in two distinct contexts: 1) as a product of research institutions that are charged with gathering, managing, and curating a wide range of structured and unstructured data; and 2) as a resource for predictive analytics.  The article includes comment based off a conversation with Cole Clark, global vice president of education and research industry, Oracle, who notes that  higher education is really being pushed hard to improve student outcomes and demonstrate that the money spent on higher education is producing the kinds of outcomes everyone wants to see.  He also notes that the pressure has pushed schools to look at ways to pull meaningful data out of their SISs, LMSs, and, increasingly, social media. 

...To create more compelling marketing campaigns, best-in-class retailers are focusing on collecting psychographic data that will complement demographic information, resulting in more in-depth segmentation, according to David Dorf, Senior Director of Technology Strategy for Oracle. Mobile and social media, he revealed, are two breeding grounds for this psychographic data. "Instead of just collecting information about age, gender and income, retailers today are starting to get information from social sites around interests and opinions to obtain a better picture of consumers," Dorf told Retail TouchPoints. While this more granular approach enables retailers to target consumers and refine marketing strategies to create more relevant campaigns, messaging and offers across channels, a lot of infrastructure is required to collect and manage all of this information. "Retailers need a full-time staff that creates the marketing messages and really engages people so that they'll give up that information," Dorf noted. "Then, of course, technology is required to process the structured and non-structured data and make something of those insights."

In fact, in a scorecard published last month by Oracle Corp., 93 percent of C-level executives believe their organizations are losing revenue - as much as 10 percent per year, an average of $50.5 million - by not being able to fully leverage the information they collect. Among retail executives, 30 percent give their organization a "D"or "F" in preparedness to manage the data deluge...

"Despite these petabytes of information retailers can easily collect, there's a breakdown at the execution level" says Mike Webster of Oracle Retail.

"This helps Oracle serve large data-intensive markets better," says Richard Fichera, a technology analyst at Forrester Research Inc. "Xsigo brings a capability that Oracle lacks and that HP and IBM have," he says. "It brings value for Oracle in being able to offer a complete network infrastructure."

"For retailers to deliver the cross-channel experience customers are demanding, they must not only manage the growing deluge of operational and customer data, but use it to gain actionable insight and equip employees to effectively use that insight immediately," said Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail. "Oracle is helping retailers to turn their data into an asset that connects interactions and optimises operations to drive profitability and support a truly personalized customer experience."

At tech giant Oracle, Mike Webster, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail, says the biggest challenge facing retailers is breaking down existing siloed processes and data stores, as in information that is stored but not used day-to-day. "Customers look at online, mobile and in-store as essentially one thing - the brand they are interacting with," Webster says. "Retailers must align their business to meet this reality. Successful analytics initiatives require data from every part of the business that affects the customer experience. So it is not only online, mobile and in-store, but also supply chain and promotions."

The December 10 edition of eCampus News includes the following article exploring the definition of big data analytics from some of the industry's most prominent voices. Of note, the article states that Oracle's definition of big data is, "the derivation of value from traditional relational database-driven business decision making, augmented with new sources of unstructured data."

For retailers, the answers to many of their most pressing questions lie in Big Data - the volumes of structured and unstructured data generated across the gamut of customer interactions. The good news is that the answers are there.