From Big Data Analytics to Big Tool Stack

Are we still discussing Big Data or we should start reviewing and monitoring its different tools and platforms? Also, how organization should determine the right tool to utilize as part of its data analytics architecture?

In today’s competitive business environment, Internet of Things devices and Information Services increasingly produce large amount of data in disparate structures. Many Open source and commercial tools continue to pop up to deal with the different characteristics of Big Data. As a result, there is an abundance of tools and platforms to analyze Big Data or act as building blocks of such. Just by reviewing open source tools, we have come across 300 tools. That number is final after we applied strict filters like legitimity of the source, license type, and last commitment activity. We are not talking about Big Data anymore, we are talking about Big Tools.

To extract value from Big Data, an organization should determine the right tool to utilize as part of its data analytics architecture. The right tool would depend on the characteristic of the data to be analyzed and the domain that the organization is operating under. The organization would train its IT workforce to obtain the technical expertise to be effective with those tools. Businesses incur costs when they try to adopt these tools or change their existing source codes to run on newer versions. In other words, technical debt. In the Big Tools era, there is no standard on how these tools come together and compose a data analytics architecture. Most of these tools are unknown to business world, some of these tools even we didn’t know. To illustrate this, Apache Beam and Apache SAMOA are good examples. Latest trends in the big data domain is moving towards providing a level of abstraction to utilize popular data processing platforms. Apache Beam implements its dataflow programming model on multiple processing platforms like Apache Spark and Apache Flink. Apache SAMOA enables programmers to apply machine learning algorithms on data streams. Applications developed with SAMOA can be executed on Apache Storm and Apache Samza. Moreover, new models and tools continue to emerge at a fast pace in Big Data domain. There is no established method to track the newest developments particularly for the open source tools.

We are working towards developing an open source big data analytics architecture. We are trying to keep it as simple as possible to provide a comprehensive picture on big data analytics lifecycle. For academia, the architecture will provide the state of the art, tools that are missing, and tools that are mature enough to be used as part of a research. It will also provide the method for tracking notable new open source tools popping up in different sources. For technical people, it will help determine the tool to use for a particular implementation. Small and medium sized enterprises can provide services using some these tools addressing the gaps in a bigger architecture. For an established firm trying to develop a strategy, the architecture will provide the comprehensive picture on what fits where. Commercial big data solution providers can also benefit from this architecture. They will see the capability they lack and collaborate with a small sized enterprise to provide that capability.

Mert Gokalpand Keres Kayabay are working with Mohamed Zaki to build this architecture. We will publish a working paper soon on this topic. 

Servitization and Service Innovation in China: Reflections from Shanghai

I’ve just spent a week in China, visiting the Southern China University of Technology (Guangzhou) and Ceibs, the international business school in Shanghai. While at Ceibs I participated in the first seminar on “Servitization and Service Innovation”. Attended by around 100 people, industrial speakers at the seminar included eCoal (an online coal purchasing platform), HP, Sevalo (a construction and mining equipment services business) and SKF. While Professors Marjorie Lyles (Indiana University), Chris Voss (Warwick Business School), Xiande Zhao (Ceibs) and I delivered academic presentations. It was a great trip, fascinating in so many ways, but I thought I might write a short blog about some of the themes that came out for me at the seminar. These include:

1.     The importance of technology to China - all the speakers talked about the way technology is changing China’s approach to business. They talked about all the traditional topics - cloud computing, big data, mobile, the need for better security. But they also talked about internet plus, China’s equivalent to Germany’s industrie 4.0 and the rest of the world’s internet of things. They recognise that as more and more devices are connected to the net, ever greater volumes of data will be created and these data can potentially deliver new and valuable business insights if analysed and interpreted correctly.

2.     Platforms were also a major theme - many of the firms that spoke, including many of those in the audience, were looking to create platforms, often to combine buying power and/or to utilize spare capacity. eCoal, for example, has created a coal buying platform which allows it to drive significant cost savings by pooling purchasing across multiple organisations. HP claimed to be the world’s biggest retailer of paper. With their print on demand services, where you pay per page rather than for the printer, HP is forced to buy large volumes of paper. But with large volumes comes the opportunity to negotiate discounts for bulk purchasing.

3.     One reason so many firms were interested in platforms was the massive success of China’s three stars of eBusiness - Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (the Chinese refer to them as BAT). These three firms dominate China’s discussion of eBusiness and have all successfully created platforms, which in turn create multi-sided markets. Tencent, for example, offers users access to free online games, sells the eyeballs to advertisers, but also sells the players of games equipment upgrades. A dominant question underlying many of the comments at the forum, was how do we create platforms that will allows us to capture multiple, complementary sources of revenue for our businesses.

4.     We also talked about challenges of servitizing - the fact that having a strong product heritage or brand sometimes makes it more difficult to offer services. Interestingly a number of the speakers referred back to the roots of their organisations, obviously product of their firm’s history, but I wondered whether history also constrained their thinking about the future. SKF asked some fantastic questions about servitization. How do we persuade our customers to buy solutions from us before we have proved their value? Who buys services and solutions? Procurement is typically not structured that way. It thinks about products and categories, yet services and solutions often cross multiple products and categories.

5.     And finally we talked about enablers of servitization - what would make the transition to services easier. Through the course of the seminar I heard five key themes: (i) get inside the mind of your customer’s customer. Understand what is value to them, so you can better help your customer create value for their customer; (ii) to understand you need deep relationships - ask yourself are we really close enough to our customers; (iii) seek to balance control and collaboration in the ecosystem - not everyone needs to control or create a ecosystem. Sometimes you have to accept you are part of one and the best you can do is seek to influence it. Think about creating win-win-win across the ecosystem to drive change; (iv) learn from your experience, codify it and share it; and (v) think about solutions - SKF has created solutions factories where they can work with customers to solve their problems. Using your own ideas and technology collaboratively with the customer is a great way of getting inside their minds and building a deep relationship with them.

One of the great privileges of life as an academic is the opportunity to travel, to experience different countries and cultures. I never fail to be inspired when I go somewhere different and meet someone new. My latest trip to China was no exception.