The sense of opportunity and the market When to make a decision?
The blue crab soldier, Mictyris longicarpus, is a species
that lives on the sandy beaches of Australia and elsewhere. Adults are 25 mm in
average, white, blue in the back. They feed on waste on the beach. The males
form large "armies" that move on the beach during low tide, then they
are buried waiting for the next low tide. The number of crabs that emerge
depends on temperature, winds, rain.
The interesting fact is that when they are in the beach looking for food they do not have to look to
see if the sea level rises, because guided by a "mysterious impulse"
the army returns to the place of origin to bury itself in the sand again. How
do they know? The tides are determined by the gravitational force of the moon
exerted on the earth; the crabs have a biological clock sensitive to that
attraction, so they "know" when they must return and seek protection
again. Mysterious and seemingly incompressible, but real.
The tide is the periodic change of the sea level produced by
the attraction of the Moon and the sun on the earth as a whole. The phenomenon
is perceptible in the sea because the water is not rigid and that is why it
deforms, creating the visible movements that alter the level of the sea.
The phenomenon of the tides has been known since antiquity.
Piteas (4th century BC) was the first to point out the relationship between the
amplitude of the tide and the phases of the Moon, as well as its periodicity.
Pliny The Elder affirmed that the tide was related to the Moon and the Sun.
Isaac Newton, in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy") gave the
explanation of the tides currently accepted.
There are two notable states: High tide , when sea water
reaches its maximum height within the tidal cycle; The low tide, opposite
state, in which the sea reaches its lowest height. The approximate time between
high tide and low tide is 6 hours, completing a cycle of 24 hours 50 minutes.
This periodicity is what influences the movement of the welded crab, without
ever failing.
Flow is the process of slow and continuous ascent of the
marine waters, by the progressive increase of the lunar or solar attraction or
of both; the ebb is the slow and progressive descent of the marine waters, due
to the decay of the lunar or solar attraction.
What do crabs have to do with business? They can
be part of a delicious business dinner, but they also suggest interesting
things.
Big data, macro data, large-scale data or mass data is a
concept that refers to the storage of large amounts of data and the procedures
used to find repetitive patterns, real-time trends.
There are many tools to deal with Big Data such as Hadoop,
NoSQL, Cassandra, Business Intelligence, Machine Learning and more, any of them
dealing with some of the three Big Data types:
I) Structured data. Data that has well defined its length
and format, such as dates, numbers or strings. They are stored in tables
(relational databases, spreadsheets)
(Ii) Unstructured data. It maintains the format with which
they were collected, they lack a specific format. They can not be saved as
tables because they do not have basic types of data (PDF documents, multimedia
documents, emails or text documents).
Iii) Semi-structured data. Data that is not limited to
certain fields, but has markers to separate the different elements. These data
have their own semi-structured metadata describing objects and their
relationships; Are accepted by convention (HTML, XML, JSON).
In the past, in a relatively simple and predictable world,
market decisions in relation to products and services that could be offered to
customers or consumers were relatively simple and straightforward, since little
data was available, harvesting methods were simple (surveys, sales and customer
records, statistical projections using basic techniques and tools such as
linear regression).
Mistakes in decisions were controllable and had little effect
on financial results. Consumers had very limited access to data and information
and therefore, few alternatives to choose or few arguments to be more
demanding. A happy world for business? Maybe, but there were few opportunities
for market growth and profitability.
At present, the business world is more complex because
consumers have more information available in real time, in volume, in variety,
coming from all over the world. The decisions they make, the preferences, the
purchasing or consumption behaviors are registered in massive form and produce
the Big Data phenomenon; This generates in companies decision makers the need
to go beyond the conventional, insufficient and obsolete means with respect to
what is now available in Big Data.
The basic descriptive statistics are insufficient and
limited, now must resort to predictive or prescriptive statistics, with more
rigorous and difficult criteria and methods, but more appropriate to the
variety, speed and volume that characterize Big Data. More difficult? Yes, but
there are also more opportunities, more risks and more profitability if you
make the right decisions.
The intelligent and productive use of Big Data involves the
use of powerful analysis tools and support in Data Science, characterized by
the creative process of massive data and the creation of value from them, a
value that improves noticeably the process of decision making. This value is the insight of Big
data, which allows acting as if an "internal sensor" advised when,
how, why, for what, where, to whom to offer a product or service.
The decision maker can no longer be an empiricist, a pure
accountant or administrator, must be more engineer and, of course, more
creative, more visionary but if the difficulties frighten him, he can always
resort to specialists who would be an adequate support. Those are data
scientists, who can help create value for the organization from Big Data.
For crabs, deciding whether to return to their shelter by
observing the approach of the body of water is equivalent to the decisions an
executive takes to respond to the current market, 21st century, relying on the
data provided by the sales reports, the history of their clients, surveys (slow,
partial, out of time). They would both die if they did; the crab is drowned and
the entrepreneur or executive is devoured by the competition.
When the crab uses his "lunar biological clock,"
he always knows exactly when to withdraw with his "army." When the
executive relies on information provided by Big Data, develops robust analysis
from them and obtains the relevant insight, it has many chances of winning the
fight in the market.
References
Big
Data visualización: Turning Big Data into Big insights
Big data
Marea
Mictyris
longicarpus
