The Emanating Dynamics of Big Data Today

Akina Ho, Head of Digital Transformation & Innovation, Great Eagle Holdings Limited [HKG: 0041]

Akina Ho, Head of Digital Transformation & Innovation, Great Eagle Holdings Limited [HKG: 0041]

Akina Ho is an experienced digital, technology and marketing leader with extensive experience in strategizing & executing change management via digital transformation and innovation for operations and new business ventures in retail, prop-tech, sales operations, asset management, real estate, Fin-tech, construction, and other areas. Akina has also developed marketing plans and strategies as part of product and services marketing to increase revenue. Currently, she serves as the Head of Digital Transformation and innovation in Great Eagle Holdings.

Can you please elaborate on the evolution of Big Data over the years?

The field of big data is gradually gaining traction in the market since its emergence in the latter part of the last decade. In today’s connected world, big data has seen tremendous growth and become a vital aspect that adds value to any sector, business, or operation. Obviously, the 3 V’s (volume, variety and velocity) are defining properties or dimensions of big data. The concept of big data is continuously evolving and forms the driving force behind the soaring waves of digital transformation. It essentially enables us to gain a better understanding of various operations, activities, or user behavior, and glean meaningful insights to make smarter business decisions in multi dimensions according to the volume of data, variety of data, and speed of data processing.

What according to you are some of the prominent challenges that your clients face daily regarding big data?

One of the biggest challenges in the world of big data today is the inability to consolidate, view, assess, and gain insights and data governance from the growing amount of information. Also, there are limited means to validate whether this accumulated data is accurate or not. As it is a relatively young market, the lack of expertise and skilled human resources needed to understand, gather, and structure data is another prominent challenge in the big data arena. I believe that it is critical to know how many vendors or technologies in the market are competent to help us validate, analyze, and visualize the oceans of data accumulated daily and implement data governance to fulfill regulators’ requirements of data privacy.

Analyzing the data and putting it in charts is the easy part, but combining the business data inside or outside of the organization and showing relevant, impactful decision-making strategies is a completely different ballgame

Visualization tools such as Tableau or other mature, dynamic software such as Microsoft Power BIs are necessary to make progress going forward in the future. However, they are still not enough. We need more intelligent, self-analyzing tools with recommendations and intuitive UI to make regular business users more perceptive when playing with these data.

Are there any other practices that you think are ideal for this evolving landscape, which multiple companies can implement and utilize regardless of their size?

Analyzing the data and putting it in charts is the easy part, but combining the business data inside or outside of the organization and showing relevant, impactful decision-making strategies is an entirely different ballgame. Yes, comprehensive dashboards enables businesses to monitor and measure performance, and metrics in real-time. It can also help businesses to react to the fast changing environment if they have the resources to understand those data. Now, there are just no methodologies for achieving what experience data users wants because so far, no one has come up with a program to automate data insights without knowing how to consolidate, clean, store, analyze and derive insights relevant to the business or market situations now and coming soon.

Where do you envision the big data market in the future? Also, do you see any evolving trends that can revolutionize how companies operate today?

I can see that more experts are emerging in the industry, and the analytic algorithms are getting more mature with time. Besides, as the implementation of big data, analytics happens across different countries and sectors, existing vendors are also learning what is missing in their solutions and how to enhance them, and teach them how to utilize big data efficiently to provide insights. Because right now, data is very subjective to the person who assembles it. Adding to this, there is growing traction in the integration of AI and machine learning in data processing today. With the much-anticipated switch towards 5G positioned to take the world by storm, enterprises need to strengthen their IT infrastructures to provide a stable highway that can efficiently handle such agile and increased network traffic and leverage new possibilities with that kind of speed and power. In addition, we need to achieve a balance between data privacy protection and data usage to avoid business development hurdles by using data technologies.

What is your advice to industry peers and aspiring professionals in the Big Data space to achieve a successful future in their business?

My advice will be to ensure that your vendors possess a flexible system, which can adapt quickly to changes in the environment and have a production-focused vision in the data analysis and consolidation part. Having AI and ML as part of the platform will be vital to succeed in the market. In addition, for customers who cannot find a one-stop solution, the key is to try to develop an architecture that hones the capability to slice and clean up accumulated data, empowering you with meaningful insights to predict your business future leveraging both internal and external data.