If you still think that Big Data isn’t relevant to your company, you’re missing the point. Because as technology has evolved, so has every aspect of the way businesses operate.

In today’s digital age, customers’ digital footprint is available to us through a myriad of online touchpoints, and ‘data’ is the name of the game. If a business has a website, social media presence, accepts credit cards, online payments etc., it has data it can collect on its customers.

Big Data will affect every single business, from multinational corporations to small local businesses, the nature of doing business as you know it is changing.

This means companies of all sizes need a strategy for big data and a plan of how to collect and analyse the data sets they have to spot new business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on.

Big Data only becomes relevant when you appreciate the possibilities it offers.

Some organisations are using cognitive computing to draw meaningful insights. Take Facebook for example, for security purposes, they are now using facial recognition to tag people in a photo as a way to request permission for upload.

Targeted marketing by Facebook, Google, Amazon, to name but a few, requires an aspect of natural language processing inherent to Big Data. Netflix and Amazon are using recommender systems that have leveraged insights drawn from Big Data to make suggestions as to what movies you would probably want to watch next.

Here in Kenya, the issue right now is capacity. There is a gap that needs filling so that Big Data can be used to grow business enterprises and to ensure that strategic decisions are not based solely on intuition and experience, but on science also.

So, the question is, how can your businesses take full advantage of data strategies and leverage technology to take your business to the next level?

Here’s part two of our discussion with our panel of experts; Timothy Oriedo – Data Scientist, Mbugua Njihia- Techpreneur, and Dr Kendi Muchungi – a Computational Neuroscientist.