Profiling the Use of Analytical Platforms and Future Architecture: From Big Data Professional’s Perspectives

This paper investigated the use of big data applications and characteristics of future architecture and analytical platforms that both regular and power users need to tackle such emerging big data environments as an increasing volume of data, diversified data type and more sophisticated desire for analytical capabilities of business users. Specifically, this paper explored ⅰ) reasons to align big data strategy, ⅱ) critical success factors of big data projects, ⅲ) advances in big data analytics to note, ⅳ) approaches for big data analytics, and finallyⅴ ) new BI architecture through interviews of professionals and literature analysis. This paper envisions a unified reporting and analysis environment that finally turns analytics users into first-class corporate talents and makes mixed set of structured and unstructured data a legitimate resource for ad-hoc and batch queries. The new architecture should aim at leveraging new analytical technology to stage, store and process large volumes of structured and unstructured data, boost sluggish data warehouses and shrink complex analytical queries to personalized data marts.