Assessing the effectiveness of big data initiatives

There is a great enthusiasm with the prospect of big data among business and industry leaders, academia and researchers. A lot of big data tools and technologies have emerged recently to capture, store, process and analyze big data. One remarkable achievement is that a handful of open source technologies have been introduced by Apache Hadoop Foundation that allows any organization to undertake big data projects. Many big data projects have been implemented during the last few years. This paper explores the benefits achieved with those projects. Big data has been applied in diverse fields including scientific and medical discovery projects, studying social science phenomena, conducting meaningful observations of real-world phenomena and running analytics for healthcare and business. Many business organizations want to find new business opportunities such as fraud detection, customer sensitivity analysis, and new product offerings while some other business organizations are still pondering the long term value of big data investments. Business leaders and managers want to be sure that big data projects can deliver true value and provide long term benefits. This paper provides an account of how recent big data project initiatives have been successful in delivering business value and highlights what technology solutions are primarily used by those big data projects.