The mighty Big Data transforming customer experiences

Big data is on the agenda for nearly all major business's desperate to identify a killer application for this and understand the business case behind spending money on this. What is it though?  Just more data warehouses with a sexier front end and whizzy reports?  Something so crazy in its value that a team of data scientists needs to guard the value secretly without releasing it to the executive? The classic definition is "high velocity, high volume and high variety". But this does little to explain it. 

Big data allows firms to combine data sets to answer live business issues quicker and more effectively than ever before. And we are not just considering classic data sets here with common data models. Big data allows unstructured data to come into the mix, information such as textual data evident in social media postings as an example to utilise sentiment context to your data. This powerful revolution means business exec can throw a question at their teams and expect an answer in weeks not months. 

This is all working in an open source environment where the technology is being exchanged in forums with the minds behind this working through these emerging technology issues. This is certainly epic and for the customer the shift in experience will be huge but likely unnoticed. Will you spot the personalised web site based on your last twitter post about wanting  a ski holiday?  Will you notice the email from your mobile phone operator that is tailored to your address and made more fluffy because they now know you have a dog?  It will be epic but you might not notice!