The National Federation Of Community Development Credit Unions

The organization selected for analysis and evaluation is American Lake Credit Union. This organization is composed of two main branches, both located in Tacoma, Washington. In contrast to banks, Credit Unions are smaller organizations and are directed by members who are selected via a vote to serve in an all-volunteer board of directors for the organization (Scott, and Johnston, p.2, 2011). Specifically, this credit union was founded in 1948 and has grown since then. (C. Fitzer, personal communication April 7, 2014). For instance, although the organization is small in size through a partnership with a credit union network, it is able to provide general financial services at diverse locations

Navy Federal Credit Union is the world’s largest credit union that serves the military and their families. Navy Federal Credit Union is non-profit organization that offer competitive packages to their employees and customers. Navy Federal has a peer 2 peer recognition programs that encourages employees to tell their co-workers how great they are by giving them a virtual “first bump (Fortune, 2016). Navy federal dedicate their services to members, and families that serve in the military. They offer a variety of variety of packages and incentives to satisfy their employees. They promote innovation by providing onsite health benefits, family care programs, compensation programs, and community involvement.

“Predictive analytics uses technology to predict the future and influence it.” [27] It is predominantly being used to improve business processes, which is a great opportunity for entrepreneurs to achieve positive business outcomes [26]. The goal of this white paper is to discuss the impact of predictive analytics in today’s world and the various concerns that come along with it. The paper addresses key research questions like what are the legal and ethical concerns that rise from predictive analytics? And where can we use predictive analytics to get positive results? We have tried to analyze the current market situation in order to answer these questions, focusing on the key areas where predictive analytics has had positive and negative impact. After intense scrutiny of the facts and details encountered by us, we have come up with some recommendations and solutions to address the issues caused by the use of predictive analytics and how their effects can be balanced by organizations.

Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett. Big Data, Data Science and its Relationship to Big Data and Data-Driven Decision making,” http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/big.2013.1508

Big data and its definition has changed over the years. In a 2011 research project by MGI and Mckinsey’s Business’ defined big data as

Business thrive when they have the most accurate, up-to-date, and relevant information at their disposal. This information can be used for a plethora of pertinent markers in small and large businesses, relating to accounting, investments, consumer activity, and much more. Big data is a term used to describe the extremely large amounts of data that floods a business every day. For decades, big data has been a growing field, facing controversy on many levels, but as of late, it has been a major innovator in the challenge of making businesses more sustainable. Big data is often scrutinized for its over-generalization and inability to display meaningful results at times. When applied correctly, data analysis can bring earth-altering information to the table.

In the increasingly competitive global business environment, each organization needs to take advantage of every tool, opportunity, and advantage it can to achieve the best products and services, to gain and maintain market share, and keep stakeholders happy from investors and workers to supply chain and customers. The advance of data analysis has opened up new vistas to support decision making. Decision support systems (Sauter, 2010) have emerged that process various forms of data to build outcome models. These have been adopted in every segment of society, in the private and public sector, from political campaigns and the military to corporations and nonprofits alike. As a whole, the new set of tools involving the strategic use of data is called business intelligence. Within that general framework, the term analytics refers to the statistical, quantitative use of data to produce explanatory and predictive models for fact-based decision making. (Sauter, 2010).

“Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the web like deer on a freeway.” – Geoffrey Moore, author and consultant.

Firstly, the main problem is deciding which data should be selected. The data, explaining customers’ desires and needs, is important to be collected while most of the enterprises are confusing about what data they should concentrate on. A recent Gartner report (2014) stresses that 64% of firms raced to plan or launch a Big Data project, though they did not have enough professional knowledge yet. To understand what customers need through Big Data possibly turns into the core of companies’ target. The large data volumes and different varieties of data lead to data complexity.

Several explanations were given about the buzzword “Big Data”. Big Data describes a process in which “serious computing power” is applied to “seriously massive and often highly complex sets of information” (Microsoft Research, 2013). Big data is also defined as a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon” based on three elements such as Technology, Analysis and Mythology (Boyd and Crawford, 2012). The first reason behind the quick expansion of Big Data is the extensive degree to which data are created, shared and utilized across the organizations and virtual networks formally and informally in the recent times. Digitization, that is, the transformation of analogue signals into digital ones, reached massive popularity in the early 1990s. The data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy offers an alternative view, according to which information appears as data that are structured in a way to be useful and relevant to a specific purpose (Rowley,

Big Data has developed over the years new and more complex methods that allows them to see market evolution, their position on the market, the efficiency of offering their services. For being able to accomplish that, a huge volume of data is needed in order to be mined so that it can generate valuable insights.

According to a report from The International Business Machines Corporation, known as IBM, 90% of the data in the world has been generated in the last two years. Frank J. Ohlhorst (2013) explains how the concept of collecting data for use in business is not new, but the scale of data that has been collected recently is so large that it has been termed Big Data (p. 1). Company executives who choose to ignore Big Data are denying their companies an advantage over their competitors. Big Data analysis is fundamental for all fields of work; it provides an insight to large amounts of data that will answer questions and make discoveries to improve efficiency in all areas of the world.

Data is the backbone of business today and has always played a critical role in business. Today in the era of “Big Data” and Digital Business, data has become the primary driver of decision making, growth and innovation. The big data today is radically different from the data of yesterday. The Big Data age has brought with it a tremendous increase in the amount of data and types of data available to businesses. New data is produced every day, generated by social networking sites, mobile phones, location, third party, business transactions, etc. We are in an era which is characterized by the 5 V’s of Big Data: Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity and Value. The Big Data opportunities are enormous, as are its challenges. In this context it is especially important to understand the Opportunities and Problems that business faces to extract value from Big Data Analytics.

Big data is an extremely important topic for future developments, growth trends and similarities between certain things. From a Microsoft blog published in 2013 big data is “the process of applying serious computing power” (HowieT, 2013). Another article describes big data as data that “exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems” (Dumbill, 2012). Based on these definitions and many more alike, big data refers to or can be described as recorded information that exceeds capacity. As brief as this is, data can be recorded using many instruments and even through observation. This topic is interesting to research and develop as new technologies are more capable at storing and reading mass data. With technology advancements, a method that took half a day, more than ten years ago, would only take a couple of minutes using present technologies. As big data is getting more widely used more businesses and enterprises will be interested in the trends shown.

Big Data embraces structured, semi-structured and unstructured information. It can be demographic or psychographic information about the customers, their opinions, product reviews etc gathered from variety of sources such as tweets, blogs, other social media content, technical devices like sensors and stream of data from mobile devices. Businesses have started using Big Data to get right information to identify right markets and right customers at the right time in order to make right strategic decisions. The Big Data market is estimated to grow to $32.1 bn by 2015 and $54.1 bn by 2017. According to the report “Be Careful or Big Data Could Bury Your Bank”, the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily and last 2 years have contributed to almost 90% of the data which exists today. It empowers institutions to learn more, create more and do more using the data available with them.