ITPEC FE Morning October 2018 Question 64

Analysing large amounts of text from social media to improve products — big data means huge, varied, fast-growing data, often unstructured and from outside the company.

Big data is usually described by volume, variety and velocity. Posts on many social media channels are vast in volume, unstructured text in variety, and produced continuously; analysing them to find customer opinions and feeding the results into product improvement is a typical business use of big data.

Answer (a)

Why not others:

• •(b) — selecting employees by years of service is a simple query on a small, structured personnel file
• •(c) — looking up a contact address in registered customer data is routine retrieval from one structured database
• •(d) — computing a profit ratio from one partner's financial statements is ordinary financial analysis of a few figures

Key rule: Call it big data only when the data is large, varied and continuously generated and is analysed for new insight; routine lookups in the company's own structured records are not.

Business Industry · AI-written, may contain errors