A Quick Note on Structured and Unstructured Data

Big data is influencing every business unit so as to streamline the processes. The huge influx of data, diversified data, and its analysis help to improve the services. Let us understand the type of data influx, management, and its benefits for a business.   

Big data collectively refers to the generation, capture, and, process of enormous data continuously for business purpose. The data a business collects is mainly of two types namely Structured data and unstructured data.

The structured data format is easy to analyze, whereas there is a myriad format for unstructured data. Still, both are important for the concrete analysis.

The data thus processed help the companies to boost productivity in marketing, operations, and risk management. The data analyst and the business stakeholders depend on these data for making intelligent business decisions.

So, it is important to understand the concept of these data, and the best practices involved in the collection, archiving, managing, and, data discovery.

Structured Data:

Structured data is highly-organized and present as the relational database [RDBMS]. It comprises of customers’ name, addresses, phone numbers, social security number, financial transactions, ZIP codes, and, etc.   

The structured data is either machine generated or recorded by man. The data created in the RDBMS structure is easily searchable through queries or algorithms like data type, field names, date, and, etc.

The structured data is managed by the legacy analytics solution and serves as a means to derive insights for business models.

Unstructured Data:

Unstructured data is not organized as it does not have predefined data models or the schema and present as non-relational database [NoSQL]. It includes text files, emails, data from mobile apps, website, social media, chats communications, business applications, sensor data, digital surveillance, and, etc.

The unstructured data is either machine generated or recorded by man. Searching through the traditional algorithms is difficult or highly impossible.

The unstructured data could be managed by the open source big data analytics like Hadoop, MongoDB, Mahout and, etc. Further, pattern recognition, email threading, text analytics, sentiment analytics, machine-learning analytics tools help to understand customer behavior.

Moreover, the data scientists today use the keywords for searching the unstructured data.

Business Benefits of Data Analysis:

In brief, both the structured and unstructured data are significant in deriving business insights. The big data is used for:

Customer-driven Marketing: Target promotions, recommend products, offer personalization for product purchase depending on the behavioral pattern so as to reduce customer churn.

Optimization of Marketing Process: The assessment of sales lift helps to identify the best way to market the products by geography and demographics.

Optimizing the pricing value: The data obtained helps to gain an insight for the product demand and optimize the pricing for the product.

Analyze customer activity: Analyzing the customer preferences, consumer sentiments, usage tracking, shoutouts on social media, helps to understand and meet the customer demands.

Operational data analysis: Leverage of manufacturing data helps for process improvement, enhance the quality of the product, and quantify risk involved in products.

Fraud detection: The data obtained from the transactional systems like POS helps to detect fraud [if any] in real time.

Enhanced Security Management: Big data is helpful to monitor and understand the possible security threats. As problems get identified beforehand, IT spending would become smarter.

Closing Thoughts:

In a nutshell, use of data is becoming an integral part of the business strategies today. The analysis of structured and unstructured data helps the business to enhance their services by meeting the challenges and addressing them proactively.