Everybody seems to be talking about machine learning these days, and a quick check of Google returns 21.2 million search results for the term. Clearly, this is a popular topic. Yet the term “machine learning” can have many different meanings, depending on the context in which it is being discussed. It is also associated with an equally lengthy list of data science techniques and technologies. Business leaders often feel overwhelmed by this rather bewildering array of terms, analytical approaches, and technology solutions. There are hundreds of algorithms, with new variants seemingly appearing every day. Researching them online does not seem to clarify the choices or point to an obviously superior decision, as most articles target deep experts and revolve around nuances of a particular model or open source package. As a result, business leaders can be reluctant to adopt something they don’t fully understand, resulting in missed opportunities.

Part 2 of 4: Grow Revenue from Your Existing Customers: How Big Data Analytics Can Help

This post is the second in a four-part series. The first installment, “Go Beyond the Symptoms: How to Overcome Revenue Growth Challenges,” discussed the key signs of slowing growth and the first steps organizations can take to turn it around. Here, we’ll discuss three new ways in which companies can use Big Data analytics to improve a business’ ability to consistently improve revenue growth from their existing customers.

Big Data analytics in 2016 occupies roughly the same spot in the corporate consciousness as did the concept of cloud computing in 2008. By now, every world-class company that generates vast quantities of data has recognized that this data has exceptionally high value as an asset. These companies have made technology investments accordingly, procuring software solutions to organize, analyze, and manage the data, storage solutions (cloud or on-premise) to facilitate access to and distribution of the data, and often also professional services to enable and operate this infrastructure.

The struggle is real — and it’s becoming increasingly apparent to companies that have dipped their toes into popular data science tools. As enterprises test the limits of their new tools, old technology, and data scientists’ time, their infrastructure is starting to show its cracks. Read on to see how these issues are revealing themselves — and more importantly — gather some ideas on what to do about it.

Over the past year, I have been averaging 2–3 customer meetings per week, resulting in over 100 customer and partner conversations around Big Data, analytics, and data science for the enterprise. From these conversations, I have found one key recurring theme: scale. Large enterprises no longer want to build one model quickly or implement just one use case in production. They all struggle with a large backlog of ideas. They need a way to rapidly turn these many ideas into real use cases that deliver tangible business value.

However, many companies simply can’t find a pathway to make this happen. Across my numerous conversations, I noticed very similar patterns and identified 5 common obstacles that can prevent companies from achieving scale for data science.

Signals empower us to predict the future by learning from the past. 

We all learn from the past. So if you failed a mathematics exam in school, you learned you had to study harder not to fail the next one. Events that happened in the past can be measured in many different ways. Measuring a past event puts it into focus. In data mining, this process translates into creating a descriptive feature to describe or tell a story about the past in some way, shape, or form.

We call these descriptive features Signals. Signals are the indicators extracted from raw data that have proven to be valuable for solving a particular problem. Signals can also be created from other Signals by transforming one piece of information into something more meaningful or interesting. For example, using the initial Signal extracted from raw data — in this case, a test score — we can create several Signals that capture past school performance in mathematics and science for a certain student.

Are your employees communicating effectively? Find out how one company got everyone speaking the same language.

The larger a company gets, the more siloed it can become, and relying on happy hours, retreats, or top-down mandates are not enough to break these silos down. No matter how hard leadership tries, people have a difficult time getting on the same page when they all have different business objectives. And no company is immune. Even Apple has struggled with silos. Steve Jobs, in an effort to deconstruct silos, set up Apple's headquarters to encourage "collisions," or interactions between people who may not have necessarily interacted. 

2015 could be the year that true personalization finally takes hold, but to achieve it, you’ll need to change the way you think about marketing.

Customers expect to be treated as individuals. They require relevancy and prefer having a relationship with a company that keeps track of their preferences, purchases, and correspondence. Customers are ready for personalized marketing, and now, finally, more and more companies are, too.