Abstract:
The demand for data driven decision making has consistently grown over the last couple of years.
Driven by the desire to compete effectively in a business environment that is ever dynamic; where
predicting the behavior of customers and their demand patterns is critical to an enterprise’s
performance; the dependence on data to provide this information to firms has inherently grown. A
key driver for this has been the growth in the volumes of data gathered by firms as well as an
increasing acquisition of computer based information systems within organizations. Issues still arise
on the slow uptake of these descriptive analytic tools as only a few organizations globally have fully
implemented data analytics systems and tools. This paper therefore presents a case for big data
analytics for firms. We first analyze the benefits and trends in big data and data analytics and later
present a case on why big data analytics is the technology for the future
