Big data has turned into the lifeblood of modern businesses. The technology can enable businesses to operate with extended flexibility and agility to churn out greater productivity. Achieving goals has become more convenient with the emergence of big data technologies and tools. In fact, a correct big data strategy can help catalyze many business operations at a scale.

To ensure better business agility, business makers must collaborate with IT teams to adopt high-end big data strategy. This initiative will also determine alignment across all departments. This will subsequently avoid potential conflicts in projects and allow cumulative outcomes to harness the true worth of big data analytics. Therefore, a collaborative approach will help businesses make optimal decisions.

In a Forrester Report, "How to Scale Business Intelligence with Hadoop-based Platforms," Boris Evelson, Vice President and Principal Analyst, described a concept called Systems of Insight, which combines the best of both worlds with agile BI and big data analytics.

Brian Hopkins, Analyst at Forrester said, "Systems of insight delivers what Big Data cannot — effective action through insights-driven software; after all, that's the only thing firms really care about."

According to him, the system of insight is equal parts of people, process, and technology. To date, vendors have driven the conversation toward the technology. To make a business difference, not just save IT cost, one needs a better strategy that includes:

Small cross-functional insights teams, sponsored by a leader with accountability for a business outcome. These teams will combine business domain expertise, data science skills, engineering expertise, and software development know-how to find, test, and implement insights.

A repeatable insight-to-execution process that integrates data science, collaboration, governance, and agile implementation workflows. Without a repeatable process, you won't have a system, just a bunch of people sifting through a sea of data for occasional nuggets.

A digital insights architecture that will be built off of the big data management and agile BI work you have done. It will add insights delivery engines and data feed management capabilities and provide a pluggable fabric for insight discovery, collaboration, and governance tools.

Business agility is more than facilitating data democratization. Leading organizations know what to do with the data and how to use the data to change the way they do business.

Big data analytics can help drive organizational, cultural, and operational change, and companies need to embrace new ways of doing business and executing the marketplace. Let the analytics facilitate the right changes to processes and structures to create better outcomes.

Systems of Insight is a great new way of looking at big data analytics, especially in terms of the impact it can have on the business. Greater business agility is the modern objective of big data analytics, and it's important to embrace how your organization can use new big data analytics to facilitate the changes necessary to achieve agility.

Moreover, with the proliferating market, it has become compulsory for firms to undertake big data initiatives and develop big data strategies to ensure their success against their agile competitors.