Big data is an emerging phenomenon. It has enormous implications upon your business strategy, profitability, and process improvements. All service systems (including healthcare) generate a lot of data. Big data has been characterized as the collection, analysis, and use of data characterized by the five Vs – volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value (of data). As the plethora of data sources grows from sensors, social media, and electronic transactions, new methods for collecting or acquiring, integrating, processing, analyzing, understanding, and visualizing data to provide actionable information are required. The discipline of applying analytic processes to find and combine new sources of data and extract hidden crucial decision-making information from the oceans of data is in rapid development. Expert application of this new knowledge in ways that deliver useful actionable results to service organizations is required. Many service-oriented organizations that are just beginning to invest in big data collection, storage, and analysis need to address the numerous issues and challenges that abound. These issues include technological, managerial, and legal. Other organizations that have begun to use new data tools and techniques must keep up with the rapidly changing work in the field. This course is designed to help managers to understand what big data is; how to recognize, collect, process, and analyze it; how to store and manage it; how to obtain useful information from it; and how to assess its contribution to operational, tactical, and strategic decision-making in service-oriented organizations such as healthcare.
