The Emerging Technology of Big Data

Its Impact as a Tool for ICT Development

Heru Susanto, Fang-Yie Leu, Chin Kang Chen

• Publisher: Apple Academic Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351241236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

Big Data is now highly regarded and accepted as a useful tool to help organizations manage their data and information effectively and efficiently. This new volume, The Emerging Technology of Big Data: Its Impact as a Tool for ICT Development, looks at the new technology that has emerged to meet the growing need and demand and studies the impact of Big Data in several areas of today's society, including social media, business process re-engineering, science, e-learning, higher education, business intelligence, and green computing.

In today's modern society, information system (IS) through Big Data contributes to the success of organizations because it provides a solid foundation for increasing both efficiency and productivity. Many business organizations and educational institutions realize that compliance with Big Data will affect their prospects for success. Everyday, the amount of data collected from digital tools grows tremendously. As the amount of data increases, the use of IS becomes more and more essential.

The book looks at how large datasets and analytics have slowly crept into the world of education and discusses methods of teaching and learning and the collection of student-learning data.

The final chapter of the book considers the environmental impacts of ICT and emphasizes green ICT awareness as a corporate strategy through information systems. The global ICT industry accounts for approximately 2 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and the manufacture, shipping, and disposal of ICT equipment also contributes environmentally. This chapter addresses these issues.

The information provided here will be valuable information for education professionals, businesses, faculty, scientists and researchers, and others.

CHAPTER 1

MANAGING BIG DATA’S IMPACT ON SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ORGANIZATION BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING

HERU SUSANTO

The Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Indonesia, E-mail: [email protected]

Department of Information Management, College of Management, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan

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ABSTRACT

Social media has been become one of the largest platforms on the Internet for people to interact with each other. It can be used as a platform to further connect with consumers. Social media means any form of websites or applications that allows users to create and share information actively or to participate in social networking. People, including students, use social media in all sorts of different ways. One of the growing trends in social media is to start a business online, a form of e-commerce, whereby the social media can serve as a platform or an online retail store for certain products. With the emergence and evolution of the smartphones that are equally competitively produced by Apple, Samsung, mobile phones have become one of the most globally popular social media platforms that provide various service of communication. The power of social networking is very interesting, as it not only serves as a platform for networking with others, but it can also be used as a hub for educational learning. In business practices, companies are able to make use of social media to reach out and connect with their customers in order to ensure consumers of their products maintain a sense of loyalty. Social media consists of unlimited data, called by big data. Big data is defined as a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology and analysis and mythology. These three concepts are linked together when technology maximizes the computation power and algorithmic accuracy to gather, analyze, link and compare large data sets. Analysis works in a way that it draws large data sets to identify the patterns in order to make economic, social, technical, and legal claim. It is a widespread myth that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy. This study emphasized the effect of big data and social media issues for organization redesign of business processes and reengineering.

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Today, social media has been the driving force behind modernization. It has become one of the largest platforms on the Internet for people to interact with each other. In terms of business perspective, it can be used as a platform to further connect with consumers. Big data, on the other hand, is the amount of data that is readily available over the Internet; it consists of everything that an individual inputs onto the Internet. Taking social media as an example, on Facebook when an individual updates his/her status, it will be saved onto the server as part of the database. This is true for Twitter as well, when one is to update their status; the information is uploaded onto the server and stored.

Kirschner and Karpinski (2010) reported a negative relation between the usage of Facebook and a student’s grade point average (GPA). Through the collection of quantitative data, the data showed that there were mean differences between the GPAs of active Facebook users, averaging 3.06 GPA, and non-active Facebook users, averaging 3.82 GPA. Thirty-five of the 219 participants provided a qualitative data by stating their reasons for the impact of Facebook on their performance. Those suggesting that Facebook had a negative impact had comments about distraction or poor time-management skills.

There are three ways in which privacy can be invaded online. The first was an uninvited intrusion into a user’s personal space. This includes online marketing, spam advertising, pop-ups and sponsored sites around the edges of a web page. The study shows that such intrusions are the most noticeable invasion of privacy in people’s minds, even though their potential consequences are the least harmful. The second threat which is believed to be the most serious is fraudulent e-commerce transactions and identity theft. Although it is the most serious, the case study shows that people are not worried about such activities as they believed that it would be done by big data companies such as Google and Facebook.

The third kind of privacy invasion is personal profiling by big companies for commercial advantages, whereby big data companies such as Google or Facebook combine hundreds and thousands of data obtained from different sources, known as the process of data blending, to understand who an individual is, where he/she lives, where they usually go, who their friends are, what they prefer to buy, etc.. This information may be simply used to make offers that are likely to appeal to us as individuals or for less harmful purposes such as knowing whether an individual engages in risky hobbies and should be charged with higher insurance rates.

This study discusses the effect of big data and social media issues for business processes and reengineering. The discussion on social media and big data is provided in Sections 1.2 and 1.3. The emerging technology issues and effect of big data and social media is discussed in Sections 1.4 and 1.5. Section 1.6 provides information on managing change through big data and social media. Finally, the conclusion is provided in Section 1.7.

1.2 SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is defined as a group of Internet-based applications that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Social media, in general, means any form of websites or applications that allows users to create and share information actively or to participate in social networking. People use social media in all sorts of different ways such as students, for example, make use of social media to learn. One of the growing trends in social media is to start a business online, a form of e-commerce, whereby the social media can serve as a platform or an online retail store for certain products.

From the definition, we can deduce that social media typically consists of tools such as blogs, social network sites, virtual worlds, games, Wikipedia, YouTube, etc. Social media is a category of which emerged online media incorporates with a number of characteristics such as participation, openness, conversation, community, and connectedness, all of which requires the abovementioned tools to execute.

It is worth noting that social media is not only found on the Internet. In recent years, with the emergence and evolution of the phones that is equally competitively produced by Apple, Samsung, and so forth, mobile phones have become one of the most globally popular social media platforms that provide various service of communication. An example of a popular form of communication on social media through the use of mobile phones is the application “WhatsApp” with an estimated 900 million users worldwide on a monthly basis, it has become arguably one of the most popular applications to date, and continues to offer its services to the world for free (Susanto, 2018; Almunawar et al., 2018a; Almunawar et al., 2018b; Susanto et al., 2016a; Almunawar et al., 2015).

A few more examples of social media would be, “Facebook,” one of the first social networks was created by university dropout Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook has a whooping 1.55 billion monthly active users on the application as of January 2016, that accounts for roughly 21% of the world’s population alone, with other applications such as Twitter and Instagram, having 320 million and 400 million users, respectively.

The power of social network is very interesting, as it not only serves as a platform for networking with others, it can also be used as a hub for educational learning. With the development and emergence of Web 2.0, which offers interactive media that is easily accessible and free, an increasing number of users have progressed it from a media for sharing to a tool for learning together. The usage of Google Drive is a good example of this, whereby an individual can create a document and then share it with others to work on the document together without having to meet each other. Social media has made it promising to improve learning and teaching experience among the students and teachers.

In business practices, companies are able to make use of social media to reach out and connect with their customers in order to ensure consumers of their products maintain a sense of loyalty. Brand loyalty is a signal that intensifies consumers’ trust and the relationship that a consumer shares with the brand itself and how they identify themselves with the brand. As a brand creates an exclusive and premium product, it produces significant means to human mind in order to make their products irresistible and irreplaceable and eventually winning the loyalty of consumers. This, in return, is able to increase sales revenue, market share, profitability to firm and helps with the growth of firm as well as maintaining their position in the marketplace (Almunawar et al., 2013a; Almunawar et al., 2013b).

The study, based on brand loyalty, which focused on Turkey, found that the driving force behind the brand loyalty was indeed an advantageous campaign on social media and also the campaign appearing on different kinds of social media platforms.(Erdoğmuş and Cicek, 2012)

1.3 BIG DATA

Big data is defined as a term that describes a large and complex amount of data both structured and unstructured inundate in business on a daily basis. Big data is a relatively new data that has only come about in the 21st century whereby the concept of big data only gained momentum in the early 2000s when an industry analyst, Doug Laney, divided the concept distinctly into three parts which is known as the three Vs: volume, velocity, and variety. Volume is where an organization collects data from a variety of sources, including business transactions, social media, and information from sensor to machine-to-machine data. In the past, storing it would have been a problem, but the new technologies, such as Hadoop, have eased the burden. Velocity is where the data streams in at an unprecedented speed, and must be dealt with in a timely manner. RFID tags, sensors, and smart metering are driving the need to deal with torrents of data in near-real time. Variety is when data comes in all different kinds of formats ranging from structured, numeric data in traditional databases to unstructured text documents, e-mail, video, audio, stock ticker data, and financial transactions.

Big data can also be defined as a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon that rests on the interplay of technology and analysis and mythology. These three concepts are linked together when technology maximizes the computation power and algorithmic accuracy to gather, analyze, link and compare large data sets. Analysis works in a way that it draws large data sets to identify the patterns in order to make economic, social, technical, and legal claim. Mythology is the widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy (Susanto et al., 2018).

Big data can be divided into two types, the first being public data and the other private data. Public data is information that is readily available for access by the public. They can be freely used, reused, and redistributed by anyone with no existing local, national, or international legal restrictions on access or usage. Private data is basically the opposite of public data, where the data is not available to the public but is held by and available to the companies that have the data. However, these data can be transferred to third parties provided that users have given permission or that the data has been anonymized whereby the identifying information has been removed. In short, data for researches or commercials relies on how users have customized their contents to be shown to the public which can be seen by anonymous or private parties where the user identifies who can see it.

The term “big data” is being thrown around today and can generally be confusing for the most people. Big data has been used as a term to describe different kinds of ideas such as huge quantities of data, social media analytics, next generation data management capabilities, real-time data, and so forth. Whichever ways they are labeled, organizations have begun to slowly understand the capability of analyzing this vast array of data and as such, there has been a group of growing pioneers that is achieving a breakthrough success in business outcomes, especially those that make use of social media. Organizations have now understood that in order to compete economically worldwide, they need to comprehensively understand the markets, consumers, products, regulations, competitors, suppliers, employees, and so forth. All these factors require the effective usage of information and analytics and the reason why the information is considered a valuable asset for a company. With the emergence of big data, organizations are discovering new ways to be more competitive and to beat the market by improving themselves in all the aspects that are beneficial for their businesses. However, they are not all able to make full use of such information, but it is definitely available with the industry.

The benefits of big data are not to be underestimated. It can benefit major companies that can use such data to their advantages. A telecom chain is one such business that could benefit. With big data, they are able to route optimally and increase the quality of service by analyzing their network in real time. They can also cope with fraud by analyzing call data records in real time. It is also possible for them to be able to increase their profits as it allows the call centers representatives to be able to flexibly modify the subscriber calling plans immediately. Telecoms are also able to tailor their marketing campaigns to suit individual consumers based on the location and social network technologies. Last, they are able to use big data and create an insight into consumers’ behavior and be able to use the data to develop new products and services to better improve their businesses (Acker et al., 2013).

1.4 EMERGING AFFECTED

With huge user base on social media applications such as Facebook, it is no surprise that a huge amount of data is generated which means that inevitably social media and big data are linked directly with each other. Statistically, it has been shown that people from around the world post 400 million tweets on Twitter, adding to the sum of 350 million pictures on Facebook and 4 billion views on YouTube, in a day, which generate a large amount of data.

1.4.1 MARKETING

One of the primary links between social media and big data is marketing. Through obtaining data from social media such as Twitter, companies are able to “retarget,” whereby the company tags online users when they surf on a certain website and more advertisement to the people who have shown some interests in the brand. Being able to retarget the potential customers is able to open up the market for the businesses as it is able to pro...