Big Data & Digital Marketing

My 3 takeaways from 2015 Gartner's research on Big Data:

1. Big Data solutions and technologies are becoming mainstream;

2. Big Data is mainly used for enhancing customer experience;

3. Business Leaders are as active as CIO/CTO in launching Big Data projects.

Organisations are overwhelmingly targeting enhanced customer experience as the primary goal of big data projects (64 percent). Process efficiency and more-targeted marketing are now tied at 47 percent. As data breaches continue to make headlines, enhanced security capabilities saw the largest increase, from 15 percent to 23 percent.

Last year, 37 percent of big data projects were initiated by the CIO, while 25 percent were initiated by business unit heads. In 2015, the roles are nearly tied, at 32 percent and 31 percent, respectively.

Today's buyers are increasingly coming from the business side of the house and not from corporate IT and self-service analytics is growing while traditional dashboard BI is in remission.
Self-service analytic tools allow power users to quickly explore, blend and visualize data to produce new business insights and to validate business data requirements to support application development and data management. 
Is the pendulum swinging in the direction of analytics empowerment and reduced time-to-answer and away from cost control and data quality management?
Gartner thought leader, Frank Buytendijk, suggested that we look to the business model that cracked the code on optimizing the centralization versus decentralization trade-off; namely, franchising.
This implies standardization of tools and enterprise licensing to drive down costs, tool-specific skilling to create larger pools of skilled workers to be shared across projects and centralized provisioning of compute infrastructure to save time and money.