Data has always been key to decision support in the financial services industry. But for centuries we have had to depend on incomplete data. Admittedly, statistical techniques of sampling have improved, reducing the impact of randomness. But never before has the news been so good: today’s world is generating a staggering amount of data at an unprecedented velocity from sensors, images, machine to machine interactions, transactions and conversations between people. The buzzword storming the industry is Big Data. Big Data has made it possible to analyze practically entire data sets, rather than depend on sampling.

Big Data holds tantalizingly precise answers to business problems. It has the ability to reshape businesses and markets. The question is: do enterprises have the ability to make sense of the complex data being captured by their systems? That’s why we have an entire issue of Communiqué dedicated to unraveling the many dimensions of the subject by a range of experts.

The demand for data and data literacy is so large that a McKinsey study1 showed that by 2018 the U.S. will fall short by 1.5 million managers fluent in data-based decision making. Business schools in the US are responding by setting up courses that offer analytics as an option.2 That’s how critical Big Data and Analytics are to your future.

Making sense of Big Data is an expert’s job. You can’t stockpile Big Data and deploy it across the enterprise at will. It calls for new analytics techniques, new platforms and new skill sets. At HCL we have domain experts who help our customers understand how to leverage Big Data by asking the right questions and bringing the right tools to the workbench. If you are wondering how to take a deep dive into the Data Revolution and where to start, this issue of Communiqué is the right place. Happy reading.

SRIRAM VS
Senior Corporate Vice President and Chief Customer
Officer - Financial Services and Healthcare,
HCL Technologies Ltd.