Big data is back. Once the darling buzzword of innovation, big data’s buzzword status had been eclipsed by a trendier focus on forces of “disruption” and a passion for everything “digital.”
The reason for big data’s resurgence as a foundation of innovation is the arrival of tools enabling the industry to more intelligently harness the vast pools of data that at first appeared so promising, only to drown the early users in volume before they could sift through and find insights.Executive Summary“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” The old saw about marketing costs could easily apply to insurance claims departments and the money they spend on investigation—specifically the money and time spent on the task of combing through web data to find relevant information about claimants. In the accompanying article, Patrick Sullivan of Carpe Data describes tools that searched 200 million URLs potentially related to two million claimants in 2018.