Group 1- Case Study- How Reliable is Big Data?
Q1. What business benefit did the organizations described in this case achieve by
analyzing and using big data?
There is massive amount of data is being generated and being used by the businesses to make
decisions, satisfaction of customer, delivering the products that customer really wants, and
customize as per the requirement.
Big Businesses like Amazon, YouTube, and Spotify have been analyzing customer interest and
recommendations were being made accordingly.
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In case of Amazon, if we search for a product online on any website, we will get
recommendation for that product through Amazon. For YouTube and Spotify, according to
your searches and test of music, they will recommend the next song. This way these
platforms are engaging customer on their websites to make them spend more time.

UK National Health Service saved about $781 million by analyzing data related to patients,
healthcare providers, and the effectiveness of prescriptions and treatments.
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Meridian Energy Ltd replaced its old predictive equipment maintenance system with IBM’s
predictive Maintenance Quality Software, which uses the real time data to give predictions,
in this way Meridian did well.
The organizations are benefitting by big data and gaining competitive advantage over others.
Q2. Identify two decisions at the organizations described in this case that were improved
by using big data and two decisions that big data did not improve.
A) Decisions that improved by using big data
 UK National Health Service saved about $781 million by analyzing data related to
patients, healthcare providers, and the effectiveness of prescriptions and
treatments.
 New-York City used big data to lower the crime rate using the software ComStat
Crime Mapping Programme.

Meridian Energy Ltd replaced its old predictive equipment maintenance system with
IBM’s predictive Maintenance Quality Software, which uses the real time data to
give predictions, in this way Meridian did well.
B) Decisions that did not improved by using big data
 The algorithm developed by Google to know how many people had influenza and
how it is spreading. To form the algorithm the data was collected from the web
searches by the people. It tried to calculate the number of people with flu in US by
relating people’s location to flue related searches queries on Google. When
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compared with CDC, it got to know that Google was tricked by the Media Coverage
of the Flue.
The decision related to Clinton’s campaign, the data collected by them was the past
figures and they assumed that the Obama supporters will vote for Clinton, and
focused on identifying voters in areas with a likelihood of high voter turnout.
Q3. List and describe the limitations to using big data
A. Relevancy of data- Avalanche of data available and being generated in every minute.
According to business needs and goals the big data projects should be used. Key metrics for
clear objectives should be defined to use big data effectively. And Also there should be
correlation among the factors considered.
B. Biases can happen with respect to person to person and could led to the misinterpretation
of prediction, as in case of the Hillary Clinton’s election campaign.
C. Due to huge amount of data sometimes it’s difficult to define algorithm as happened with
the google algorithm for Influenza detection.
D. Inaccessible User data- Security is one of major concern for people today, and that’s why the
data is not accessible for anybody and it should be properly transferred from one machine to
another machine.
Q4. Should all organization try to collect big data? Why or Why not? What Management,
Organization, and Technology should be addressed before company decides to work with
big data.
Ans: Today data is the new oil and one of the important factors for any business. Its not necessarily
mean that every business should start collecting big data. It can vary according to scale of the
organization, type of industry and most importantly the technological capacity that organization
possess.
ManagementManagement should analyze if their business does really need to collect big data and is it aligned
with the objectives and goals of the organization.
OrganizationSmall companies don’t need much of a data, so that they can purchase it the required data from the
provider in a structured manner so that they don’t have spend much money to collect data and
structure it to cater its need.
Manufacturing firm do required data but same for them they can take it from provider which we call
data center without spending more energy on collecting data.
There are various IT services which sells data to business so that businesses can know and forecast
the demands for their products. Google, YouTube and various online websites collects user data like
customer interests, preferences and use it for their own purpose as well as sell it to the businesses.
TechnologyDo our business has the right technology and people to work with big data in order to interpret the
results and use it for the benefit of organization. There are various sources where we can get
required data from like IT firms and data centers.