Page 141 - Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities

122 Big Data Analytics for Connected Vehicles and Smart Cities What Are Analytics? 123

understanding. For example, a retailer can gain insight into customer behavior
through analytics that show that when customers buy one product they also
buy another one. The action that could be taken as a result of this insight would
be for the retailer to place both products adjacent to each other within the store
to make it easier for customers. The retailer might also decide to place another
product adjacent to the other two in order to increase sales of the third product.
Analytics can reveal that the customer might have a need for the third product.
Understanding the connection between the data items based on analytics allows
new value to be realized.
Major banks also make use of analytics to determine the reasons why cus-
tomers move to other banks. The path that a specific customer takes through
customer-service facilities online and by telephone might reveal causes that can
be rectified.
In another example beyond transportation, a well-known movie studio
made use of analytics conducted on a sample of the global Twitter feed to as-
sess the impact of a new movie, in terms of audience reaction. The insight
gained was used as input to the decision on the timing for releasing the movie
in theaters and subsequently moving the distribution of the movie to Netflix
and cable.
The value of analytics also lies in the ability to go beyond reporting. Even
world-class reporting, as discussed earlier, can only inform and provide summa-
ries of measurements. Analytics can characterize trends, patterns, and insights
within the data and provide the basis for actionable strategies that can improve
the performance of the organization. Like the objectives and use cases discussed
in Chapters 2 and 9, analytics have real value when applied within an overall
process that leads to changes in the performance of the enterprise. This makes
it very important to make use of analytics within an overall structured approach
to extracting value from big data.

6.6 Smart City Services Analytics

Probably the best way to explain the application of analytics to smart city trans-
portation is to provide some examples. Chapter 5 discusses the smart city from
a transportation perspective and defines services that represent smart city trans-
portation. These sixteen services are summarized in Table 6.1 along with analyt-
ics that has been defined for each service. This linking of services and analytics
is intended to reinforce the notion the analytics should be identified based on
objectives that lead to the definition of uses cases. This ensures that the initial
objectives and desired end results are kept to the forefront as the analytics are
identified and applied. While this process is an important aspect of analysis, it
is not the only way to approach big data and analytics these days. The emer-