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Big Data has transformed companies. Industries from sports to farming have taken advantage of the unparalleled efficacy afforded by sophisticated analytical models. On a societal level, previously intractable problems have been addressed through use of large-scale information, a unique benefit to the modern proliferation of data.

But it comes with a responsibility.

A recent article in the Stanford Law Review highlighted this point. In it, authors Neil Richards and Jonathan King called for a greater social understanding of the best time to use Big Data. Richards and King implore authorities to use information responsibly, noting that is the key to getting the most social benefit from it.

"Recognizing the paradoxes of big data, which show its perils alongside its potential, will help us to better understand this revolution. It may also allow us to craft solutions to produce a revolution that will be as good as its evangelists predict," they write. 

One important facet is transparency. It is not enough simply for companies to know more about their customers. The customers should in turn know that their information is being collected and be able to make a reasoned choice about it. While privacy is still an important and valuable concern—you don't need to disclose all of your sales figures to anybody that happens to be shopping in your store—if you are judging a person based on a given basis, it is generally advisable that they at least know what your criteria are. In addition, it is incumbent upon government and technology leaders to improve their products as much as possible — something the FileMaker service continues to strive for with each new product. 

Richards and King are also quick to note the inherent power of information sharing, citing the Arab Spring protestor's ability to organize quickly and efficiently. In response, however, the Syrian regime secretly used internet-mining practices to punish dissent, a departure from ethical practice of Big Data. Thus, we see that the goals behind the usage of these tactics is crucial in determining whether they are right. 

In the end, analytics are a positive force, and a tool for change not only in business but also in society. However, it is up to the person gathering and using the information to deploy it positively. If your company is using FileMaker fairly, transparently and safely, it is contributing to best practices. 

Pattern recognition is one of our most crucial instincts. Being able to understand new things quickly by using information gleaned in the past could help early humans avoid eating the wrong berries, or being devoured by an aggressive animal. That tendency carried into the modern institution of sales: identifying what a customer needs is the first step towards being able to provide it for them. 

In the past, this process was largely organic. A salesperson could meet every person that came into their shop, and interact with them on a personal level to get information about what might motivate them. However, many modern companies don't have that luxury: they have hundreds of thousands or even millions of potential consumers, and global reaches. It's physically impossible to shake every customer's hand and have a face to face conversation.

Big data can help bridge that gap.

By using custom software, like the FileMaker service, companies can take the piles of piles of information they have, and sort it into something useable. Take, for example, clothing retailer Brooks Brothers.

The company maintains more than 500 physical and online clothing outlets worldwide. The amount of information collected was overwhelming, and no one person could parse through it without any level of effectiveness. Analytics director Cindy Lincks was at a loss, unable to sift through the spreadsheets quickly to find usable nuggets that would translate to sales. 

The solution, it turned out, was custom database software. Starting with their online store, Brooks Brothers began using big data principles to make decisions. Rather than poring over each granular piece of data, they outsourced the job to a firm that specialized in large-scale analytics. Some of the results, it turned out, were surprising. Lincks recalls one suit in particular whose prominent placement led to unforeseen problems. 

"Logically you'd put the suit in the first spot in the store order, but what we didn't notice was it was being overexposed in so many places, and it was being sold out quickly," Lincks told the Washington Post.

This wound up disappointing potential customers, and hindering conversions.

Now, Lincks and her team can solve such issues in real time, and much more quickly. Instead of spending precious time poring over individual data points, they can focus on innovation and resolution: the software provides reports automatically that once would have taken an estimated 8 hours to compile manually. Instead, the analytics team can just log into their dashboard, look at the info on customer views, inventory and ordering patterns and make quick determinations about where their marketing dollars should be allocated.

Big data isn't just for big businesses: smaller retailers can use these principles on a modified scale. A program like FileMaker pro can help you organize and analyze more quickly and efficiently than simple spreadsheets ever could. Instead of being caught by surprise by trends, you can monitor them as they happen, and be in the best possible position to take full advantage and convert more sales.  

It's the next best thing to having a personal conversation with each customer. 

Amazon, the giant online marketplace that sells everything from candy to appliances, has released its entry into the Big Data Games.

The service is called Kinesis, and it's designed to support the efforts of software developing companies. It will be able to stream data instantly, as well as analyze thousands of streams any second. It's also scalable, allowing app developers to pull from as many sources as they need at the time.

As such, it is price a la carte. You pay based on the amount of information used and how it is packaged. The model is based on a unit called a "shard" which measures Internet thoroughput. One shard will allow a user to capture 1 MB per second of data at up to 1,000 PUT transactions per second, and enable apps to read data at up to 2 MB per second.

For those looking into custom database software, this development could be an interesting one: this real-time data will allow companies to react to changes instantly, as well as provide all the other benefits of information analysis. Kinesis might ultimately grant a wider flexibility to businesses with wide user bases. 

In a statement, Terry Hanold, vice president of new business initiatives at Amazon Web Services, described the value of this functionality. 

"Database and MapReduce technologies are good at handling large volumes of data," Hanold said. "But they are fundamentally batch-based, and struggle with enabling real-time decisions on a never-ending — and never fully complete — stream of data. Amazon Kinesis aims to fill this gap, removing many of the cost, effort and expertise barriers customers encounter with streaming data solutions."

While for a smaller company, a service like FileMaker might be the best solution, this large-scale data capturing could be big news for more massive corporations. 

In many ways, big data is the future of business. The ability to sort, process and analyze the increasing amounts of information that companies now have at their disposal is an important asset. Really profiting from this opportunity, however, takes the right corporate environment. 

The whole company has to be on the same page. If management is unwilling to trust any information that doesn't confirm its "gut feeling", there is little value in compiling a database. Trusting in the collection process is a crucial part of using data well, and an unwilling executive could undermine the the entire process. Before a business agrees that it will adhere to Big Data principles, it has to make sure there is a wholesale commitment to it. 

Another important takeaway from database management is "actionability." What do you want to do with the information you've gathered? Setting concrete goals before looking at the numbers can help guide the discussion and suggest practical solutions. 

Say, for example, you're managing a clothing retailer, and you use FileMaker to determine that your most heavily trafficked hours are between 9 a.m. and noon. Are you able to devote the extra personnel and marketing hours to taking advantage of these findings? If not, the value of this knowledge is sharply curtailed. But if you are adaptable, you could reorganize your sales goals to take advantage of the increased traffic and add extra salespeople to increase conversions. 

If you're a company looking to make big profits with big data, it might take more than just talented FileMaker developers: a cultural change might be needed.

A wide variety of industries have benefited from using custom database software to help organize the massive amount of information they process. As this blog has mentioned before, healthcare could be next in line. 

There's certainly a demand. Most of the information doctors collect exists in free-form notes in Electronic Health Record systems or as handwritten papers stuffed into folders. These relatively ad hoc file storage systems make wholesale analysis prohibitively difficult, which blocks doctors from using past data as effectively as they might. Big data in healthcare could help change that and yield some important benefits. By using custom database software to quickly aggregate and analyze patient histories and symptoms, physicians could better treat patients, address the effects of chronic diseases and reduce readmissions. Doctors could also study demographic information to track the incidence and spread of disease across larger samples of the population. 

There is one major wrinkle. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects patients from having their sensitive personal information accessed, blocks usage of patient health information for purposes other than treatments, operations or billing. The solution to this may be simple: A patient-consent-driven information system. To this end, the federal government has introduced an incentive program with the stated goal of having patient health information shared more easily and with full consent. 

Medicine is a constantly evolving field with a long tradition. The combination of the massive amount of information constantly being gathered and the uniquely high incentive for innovation makes it ripe for a systemic update in data management. Between the new methods for database management and the government incentives for greater patient involvement, this might be the time. 

While it may be lost in the hoopla that is big data, there is one very important element to the strategy that cannot be ignored: big data is going to change the way you do business. 

What do we mean by this? On the surface, it probably sounds like we're overstating the obvious. Of course big data is going to change the way business is done. It's going to allow decision makers to view and analyze information that was previously unavailable, providing companies with the ability to do things never thought possible. But there's far more to it than that. In short, big data is going to change everything about standard business operations.

That's the sentiment of a recent Forbes article titled "Why Big Data Matters." The article talks about the Bayesian inference, the act of making educated guesses and updating them after collecting new data that theoretically enhances the accuracy of these guesses. This was popular during World War II as it allowed soldiers to project the location of German subs, but it never caught on in the business world because there was simply not enough information for it to be practical. 

Instead, businesses mostly adopted the approach created by Ronald Fisher, which involves controlling every aspect of the prediction process. Essentially, it's a less effective method, but it was the best individuals could do with the limited information they have. However, given the growth of data volumes, that is changing dramatically. Because users have access to so much information, they can now trust that new data will consistently flow into their systems, allowing them to constantly update their projections. 

Greg Satell, the article's author, explained this in further detail.

"What you really need to know about big data is this:  [big data] represents a fundamental shift in how we do things," he wrote. "In effect, big data opens the door to a Bayesian approach to strategy where we no longer try to be 'right' based on controlled research and small samples, but rather become less wrong over time as real world information floods in."

The big data revolution is underway, but the only way your company can take advantage of it is if you have the right tools. A custom database software system made by FileMaker developers will allow you to embrace big data and change the way you do business for the better. 

No company wants to be behind the times or its competition when it comes to the latest technology. If other businesses hop on the bandwagon of innovative tools that customers flock to, those organizations are going to progress at a different rate than companies that sit back and wait. However, with so many "must have" devices and services hitting the market, which ones should business owners invest in?

A recent article from ZDNet attempted to answer this by looking at the top 2014 enterprise IT trends. While certain items, like the cloud and smart machines dominate the list, also near the top is software solutions. Whether it is mobile applications or HTML5, this is an area that cannot be ignored.

"Software defined everything," the article reads. "You've heard of software defined networking. And software defined data centers. Now get ready for software-defined everything. Vendors will beat this term to death because they are all trying to defend their turf while growing via adjacent markets. Here's the catch: Vendors aren't likely to support standards that in practice will take their core businesses away."

With more physical IT hardware options like servers going virtual, software appears to be on the verge of taking over. However, it is a system that can be complicated, especially for businesses that lack strong internal tech knowledge. By partnering with a software development firm, organizations receive a hand with custom application creation and ensure they have a solid foot in the future of business operations.

Incorporating big data into the human resources department has become increasingly beneficial in the technology and information age, but a number of organizations are struggling with formulating an effective strategy.

Monitoring the behaviors and actions of employees and developing reports are all crucial elements in the human resources department, and if it can effectively capture that information and utilize it to better overall operations, the business as a whole can benefit. Like all areas impacted by big data, however, these processes have to be efficient. This requires the development of systems and the implementation of strategies designed to streamline the employee analysis process. 

According to research detailed in Forbes, only 14 percent of organizations have effectively used data to monitor and process employee behaviors and actions.

"What are the rest doing?  Dealing with reporting," wrote Josh Bersin, the article's author. He added that the challenges faced by these organizations need to be mitigated, particularly when considering the benefits of valuable employee data management.  "In addition, these HR teams are four times more likely to be respected by their business counterparts for their data-driven decision-making, giving them true potential to help change the business," he continued.

Much like other business big data projects, companies can benefit from a FileMaker development project. The scalability of these solutions can be very beneficial because the amount of data in the HR space is likely only going to increase as time goes on. Building a custom database software system will give businesses the ability to capitalize on their information and develop stronger HR departments.

As you begin to plan your strategies and budgets for 2014, it's important to stay on top of the latest trends, particularly in the realm of technology. Application development is growing in the business sector, as more companies are working with developers to build solutions for processing data, communication and boosting overall productivity. The question is, how are these apps being developed now?

A study conducted by Forrester found three trends regarding application development. They are:

• Cloud deployment models are changing the economics of applications
• User experience is improving
• Componentization supporting smart functionality.

All three are essentially geared toward improving the application's performance in an environment that's most convenient for users. In the business realm, this is crucial for those tasked with processing and reporting on data. Because we are more connected than ever before, hosting these solutions in the cloud has become essential. Moreover, the cloud has offered new advantages by allowing organizations to upgrade and manage their solutions more frequently.

Traditional on-premises applications are tapped out," the study says. "Software upgrades have become so costly and difficult that most customers defer them for years, sometimes even for a decade."

The future of application development will allow users to customize and manipulate their solutions with greater ease. They will be able to scale and flex their software in a way that accommodates any business change, such as new users brought on by a hiring spike or a massive growth of data. 

Partnering with a FileMaker developer will allow companies to obtain the solutions they need to keep up with trends and maintain their economic viability as software applications continue to evolve.

With every major trend in business comes a myriad of questions, concerns and misconceptions about it. Big data is no different. Because it's an evolving concept and some of the ideas behind it are very new, there are those who aren't entirely sure how it works. At the very least, their ideas about how to make it work aren't always correct.

This sentiment was expressed in a recent Wired article that listed and debunked three myths pertaining to big data management. According to Juergen Urbanski, the article's author, the three lies businesses are telling themselves are: "We don't have a big data problem, we don't have the budget required for big data and we don't have the data scientists needed to process and analyze big data."

The first issue is relatively simple to address. Organizations simply have to come to the realization that their data processing has to be better for them to maintain their viability in an increasingly data-controlled future. Even if a company doesn't feel like it has enough data to consider its situation a "big data problem" its digital information will undoubtedly continue to increase. Urbanski said this could result in problems when infrastructures are maxed out.

"First, I have yet to meet a large organization that does not have a data management problem, even at terabyte scale," he wrote. "The problem might be that existing enterprise data warehouses are reaching capacity limits, that older data which has been archived sits "in the dark," meaning it cannot be queried for insights, or that a lot of potentially valuable data is simply not collected or discarded too soon."

The main theme behind the other two myths is that businesses believe they cannot properly run a successful big data campaign because they lack adequate resources. This is not true, because having the right software system in place can assist a number of big data efforts. 

Developing a FileMaker solution can allow companies to effectively manage their information deficiencies and manage them without having to spend a lot of money or utilize a tremendous amount of personnel. A FileMaker-based custom database software system provides the ability for businesses to collect, track, store and analyze all data, which will help mitigate any potential dangers related to excessive volumes of information.