Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity

McKinsey Global Institute

June 2011

Big data: The next frontier
for innovation, competition,
and productivity

The McKinsey Global Institute
The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), established in 1990, is McKinsey &
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Copyright © McKinsey & Company 2011


May 2011

Big data: The next frontier
for innovation, competition,
and productivity
James Manyika
Michael Chui
Brad Brown
Jacques Bughin
Richard Dobbs
Charles Roxburgh
Angela Hung Byers

Preface

The amount of data in our world has been exploding. Companies capture trillions of
bytes of information about their customers, suppliers, and operations, and millions
of networked sensors are being embedded in the physical world in devices such
as mobile phones and automobiles, sensing, creating, and communicating data.
Multimedia and individuals with smartphones and on social network sites will
continue to fuel exponential growth. Big data—large pools of data that can be
captured, communicated, aggregated, stored, and analyzed—is now part of every
sector and function of the global economy. Like other essential factors of production
such as hard assets and human capital, it is increasingly the case that much of
modern economic activity, innovation, and growth simply couldn’t take place without
data.
The question is what this phenomenon means. Is the proliferation of data simply
evidence of an increasingly intrusive world? Or can big data play a useful economic
role? While most research into big data thus far has focused on the question of its
volume, our study makes the case that the business and economic possibilities of big
data and its wider implications are important issues that business leaders and policy
makers must tackle. To inform the debate, this study examines the potential value
that big data can create for organizations and sectors of the economy and seeks to
illustrate and quantify that value. We also explore what leaders of organizations and
policy makers need to do to capture it.
James Manyika and Michael Chui led this project, working closely with Brad Brown,
Jacques Bughin, and Richard Dobbs. Charles Roxburgh also made a valuable
contribution. Angela Hung Byers managed the project team, which comprised
Markus Allesch, Alex Ince-Cushman, Hans Henrik Knudsen, Soyoko Umeno, and
JiaJing Wang. Martin N. Baily, a senior adviser to McKinsey and a senior fellow at
the Brookings Institution, and Hal R. Varian, emeritus professor in the School of
Information, the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics at
the University of California at Berkeley, and chief economist at Google, served as
academic advisers to this work. We are also grateful for the input provided by Erik
Brynjolfsson, Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management
and director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, and Andrew McAfee, principal
research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business.
The team also appreciates the contribution made by our academic research
collaboration with the Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) at the University
of California, San Diego, which aimed to reach a better understanding of data
generation in health care and the public sector, as well as in the area of personal
location data. We are grateful to Roger E. Bohn, professor of management and
director at the GIIC, and James E. Short, the Center’s research director, the principal
investigators, as well as to graduate students Coralie Bordes, Kylie Canaday, and
John Petrequin.

Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity

We are grateful for the vital input and support of numerous MGI and McKinsey
colleagues including senior expert Thomas Herbig; Simon London, McKinsey
director of digital communications; MGI senior fellow Jaana Remes; and expert
principals William Forrest and Roger Roberts. From McKinsey’s health care practice,
we would like to thank Stefan Biesdorf, Basel Kayyali, Bob Kocher, Paul Mango, Sam
Marwaha, Brian Milch, David Nuzum, Vivian Riefberg, Saum Sutaria, Steve Savas,
and Steve Van Kuiken. From the public sector practice, we would like to acknowledge
the input of Kalle Bengtsson, David Chinn, MGI fellow Karen Croxson, Thomas
Dohrmann, Tim Kelsey, Alastair Levy, Lenny Mendonca, Sebastian Muschter,
and Gary Pinshaw. From the retail practice, we are grateful to MGI Economics
Research knowledge specialists Imran Ahmed, David Court, Karel Dörner, and
John Livingston. From the manufacturing practice, we would like to thank André
Andonian, Markus Löffler, Daniel Pacthod, Asutosh Padhi, Matt Rogers, and Gernot
Strube. On the topic of personal location data, we would like to acknowledge the help
we received from Kalle Greven, Marc de Jong, Rebecca Millman, Julian Mills, and
Stephan Zimmermann. We would like to thank Martha Laboissiere for her help on
our analysis of talent and Anoop Sinha and Siddhartha S for their help on mapping
big data. The team also drew on previous MGI research, as well as other McKinsey
research including global iConsumer surveys, McKinsey Quarterly Web 2.0 surveys,
health care system and hospital performance benchmarking, multicountry tax
benchmarking, public sector productivity, and research for the Internet Advertising
Board of Europe. The team appreciates the contributions of Janet Bush, MGI
senior editor, who provided editorial support; Rebeca Robboy, MGI external
communications manager; Charles Barthold, external communications manager
in McKinsey’s Business Technology Office; Julie Philpot, MGI editorial production
manager; and graphic design specialists Therese Khoury, Marisa Carder, and Bill
Carlson.
This report contributes to MGI’s mission to help global leaders understand the
forces transforming the global economy, improve company performance, and work
for better national and international policies. As with all MGI research, we would
like to emphasize that this work is independent and has not been commissioned or
sponsored in any way by any business, government, or other institution.

Richard Dobbs
Director, McKinsey Global Institute
Seoul
James Manyika
San Francisco
Charles Roxburgh
London
Susan Lund
Director of Research, McKinsey Global Institute
Washington, DC
June 2011

vi

Big data—a growing torrent

$600

to buy a disk drive that can
store all of the world’s music

5 billion
30 billion

mobile phones
in use in 2010

pieces of content shared
on Facebook every month

40%

projected growth in
global data generated
per year vs.

5%

growth in global
IT spending

235

terabytes data collected by
the US Library of Congress
by April 2011

15 out of 17

sectors in the United States have
more data stored per company
than the US Library of Congress


vii

Big data—capturing its value

$300 billion

potential annual value to US health care—more than
double the total annual health care spending in Spain

€250 billion

potential annual value to Europe’s public sector
administration—more than GDP of Greece

$600 billion

potential annual consumer surplus from
using personal location data globally

60%

potential increase in
retailers’ operating margins
possible with big data

140,000–190,000
1.5 million
more deep analytical talent positions, and

more data-savvy managers
needed to take full advantage
of big data in the United States


Contents

Executive summary

1

1. Mapping global data: Growth and value creation

15

2. Big data techniques and technologies

27

3. The transformative potential of big data in five domains

37

3a. Health care (United States)

39

3b. Public sector administration (European Union)

54

3c. Retail (United States)

64

3d. Manufacturing (global)

76

3e. Personal location data (global)

85

4. Key findings that apply across sectors

97

5. Implications for organization leaders

111

6. Implications for policy makers

117

Appendix

123

Construction of indices on value potential
and ease of capture

123

Data map methodology

126

Estimating value potential in health care (United States)

127

Estimating value potential in public sector administration (European Union)

129

Estimating value potential in retail (United States)

130

Estimating value potential in personal location data (global)

133

Methodology for analyzing the supply and demand of analytical talent

134

Bibliography

137


Executive summary

Data have become a torrent flowing into every area of the global economy.1
Companies churn out a burgeoning volume of transactional data, capturing trillions
of bytes of information about their customers, suppliers, and operations. millions of
networked sensors are being embedded in the physical world in devices such as
mobile phones, smart energy meters, automobiles, and industrial machines that
sense, create, and communicate data in the age of the Internet of Things.2 Indeed, as
companies and organizations go about their business and interact with individuals,
they are generating a tremendous amount of digital “exhaust data,” i.e., data that
are created as a by-product of other activities. Social media sites, smartphones,
and other consumer devices including PCs and laptops have allowed billions of
individuals around the world to contribute to the amount of big data available. And
the growing volume of multimedia content has played a major role in the exponential
growth in the amount of big data (see Box 1, “What do we mean by ‘big data’?”). Each
second of high-definition video, for example, generates more than 2,000 times as
many bytes as required to store a single page of text. In a digitized world, consumers
going about their day—communicating, browsing, buying, sharing, searching—
create their own enormous trails of data.

Box 1. What do we mean by big data?
“Big data” refers to datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database
software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze. This definition is
intentionally subjective and incorporates a moving definition of how big a
dataset needs to be in order to be considered big data—i.e., we don’t define
big data in terms of being larger than a certain number of terabytes (thousands
of gigabytes). We assume that, as technology advances over time, the size of
datasets that qualify as big data will also increase. Also note that the definition
can vary by sector, depending on what kinds of software tools are commonly
available and what sizes of datasets are common in a particular industry.
With those caveats, big data in many sectors today will range from a few
dozen terabytes to multiple petabytes (thousands of terabytes).
In itself, the sheer volume of data is a global phenomenon—but what does it mean?
Many citizens around the world regard this collection of information with deep
suspicion, seeing the data flood as nothing more than an intrusion of their privacy.
But there is strong evidence that big data can play a significant economic role to
the benefit not only of private commerce but also of national economies and their
citizens. Our research finds that data can create significant value for the world
economy, enhancing the productivity and competitiveness of companies and the

1 See “A special report on managing information: Data, data everywhere,” The Economist,
February 25, 2010; and special issue on “Dealing with data,” Science, February 11, 2011.
2 “Internet of Things” refers to sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects, connected
by networks to computers. See Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts, “The
Internet of Things,” McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010.

1

2

public sector and creating substantial economic surplus for consumers. For instance,
if US health care could use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and
quality, we estimate that the potential value from data in the sector could be more
than $300 billion in value every year, two-thirds of which would be in the form of
reducing national health care expenditures by about 8 percent. In the private sector,
we estimate, for example, that a retailer using big data to the full has the potential to
increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. In the developed economies
of Europe, we estimate that government administration could save more than
€100 billion ($149 billion) in operational efficiency improvements alone by using big
data. This estimate does not include big data levers that could reduce fraud, errors,
and tax gaps (i.e., the gap between potential and actual tax revenue).
Digital data is now everywhere—in every sector, in every economy, in every
organization and user of digital technology. While this topic might once have
concerned only a few data geeks, big data is now relevant for leaders across every
sector, and consumers of products and services stand to benefit from its application.
The ability to store, aggregate, and combine data and then use the results to perform
deep analyses has become ever more accessible as trends such as Moore’s Law
in computing, its equivalent in digital storage, and cloud computing continue to
lower costs and other technology barriers.3 For less than $600, an individual can
purchase a disk drive with the capacity to store all of the world’s music.4 The means
to extract insight from data are also markedly improving as software available to
apply increasingly sophisticated techniques combines with growing computing
horsepower. Further, the ability to generate, communicate, share, and access data
has been revolutionized by the increasing number of people, devices, and sensors
that are now connected by digital networks. In 2010, more than 4 billion people,
or 60 percent of the world’s population, were using mobile phones, and about
12 percent of those people had smartphones, whose penetration is growing at
more than 20 percent a year. More than 30 million networked sensor nodes are now
present in the transportation, automotive, industrial, utilities, and retail sectors. The
number of these sensors is increasing at a rate of more than 30 percent a year.
There are many ways that big data can be used to create value across sectors of
the global economy. Indeed, our research suggests that we are on the cusp of a
tremendous wave of innovation, productivity, and growth, as well as new modes of
competition and value capture—all driven by big data as consumers, companies, and
economic sectors exploit its potential. But why should this be the case now? Haven’t
data always been part of the impact of information and communication technology?
Yes, but our research suggests that the scale and scope of changes that big data
are bringing about are at an inflection point, set to expand greatly, as a series of
technology trends accelerate and converge. We are already seeing visible changes in
the economic landscape as a result of this convergence.
Many pioneering companies are already using big data to create value, and others
need to explore how they can do the same if they are to compete. Governments,
too, have a significant opportunity to boost their efficiency and the value for money
3 Moore’s Law, first described by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, states that the number of
transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
In other words, the amount of computing power that can be purchased for the same amount of
money doubles about every two years. Cloud computing refers to the ability to access highly
scalable computing resources through the Internet, often at lower prices than those required to
install on one’s own computers because the resources are shared across many users.
4 Kevin Kelly, Web 2.0 Expo and Conference, March 29, 2011. Video available at:
www.web2expo.com/webexsf2011/public/schedule/proceedings.


they offer citizens at a time when public finances are constrained—and are likely to
remain so due to aging populations in many countries around the world. Our research
suggests that the public sector can boost its productivity significantly through the
effective use of big data.
However, companies and other organizations and policy makers need to address
considerable challenges if they are to capture the full potential of big data. A shortage
of the analytical and managerial talent necessary to make the most of big data is
a significant and pressing challenge and one that companies and policy makers
can begin to address in the near term. The United States alone faces a shortage of
140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills as well as 1.5 million managers
and analysts to analyze big data and make decisions based on their findings. The
shortage of talent is just the beginning. Other challenges we explore in this report
include the need to ensure that the right infrastructure is in place and that incentives
and competition are in place to encourage continued innovation; that the economic
benefits to users, organizations, and the economy are properly understood; and that
safeguards are in place to address public concerns about big data.
This report seeks to understand the state of digital data, how different domains
can use large datasets to create value, the potential value across stakeholders,
and the implications for the leaders of private sector companies and public sector
organizations, as well as for policy makers. We have supplemented our analysis of big
data as a whole with a detailed examination of five domains (health care in the United
States, the public sector in Europe, retail in the United States, and manufacturing and
personal location data globally). This research by no means represents the final word
on big data; instead, we see it as a beginning. We fully anticipate that this is a story
that will continue to evolve as technologies and techniques using big data develop
and data, their uses, and their economic benefits grow (alongside associated
challenges and risks). For now, however, our research yields seven key insights:

1. DATA HAVE SWEPT INTO EVERY INDUSTRY AND BUSINESS
FUNCTION AND ARE NOW AN IMPORTANT FACTOR OF
PRODUCTION
Several research teams have studied the total amount of data generated, stored,
and consumed in the world. Although the scope of their estimates and therefore their
results vary, all point to exponential growth in the years ahead.5 MGI estimates that
enterprises globally stored more than 7 exabytes of new data on disk drives in 2010,
while consumers stored more than 6 exabytes of new data on devices such as PCs
and notebooks. One exabyte of data is the equivalent of more than 4,000 times the
information stored in the US Library of Congress.6 Indeed, we are generating so much

5 See Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, How much information? 2003, School of Information
Management and Systems, University of California at Berkeley, 2003; papers from the IDC Digital
Universe research project, sponsored by EMC, including The expanding digital universe, March
2007; The diverse and exploding digital universe, March 2008; As the economy contracts, the
digital universe expands, May 2009, and The digital universe decade—Are you ready?, May 2010
(www.emc.com/leadership/programs/digital-universe.htm); two white papers from the University
of California, San Diego, Global Information Industry Center: Roger Bohn and James Short, How
much information? 2009: Report on American consumers, January 2010, and Roger Bohn, James
Short, and Chaitanya Baru, How much information? 2010: Report on enterprise server information,
January 2011; and Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, “The world’s technological capacity to store,
communicate, and compute information,” Science, February 10, 2011.
6 According to the Library of Congress Web site, the US Library of Congress had 235 terabytes
of storage in April 2011.

3

4

data today that it is physically impossible to store it all.7 Health care providers, for
instance, discard 90 percent of the data that they generate (e.g., almost all real-time
video feeds created during surgery).
Big data has now reached every sector in the global economy. Like other essential
factors of production such as hard assets and human capital, much of modern
economic activity simply couldn’t take place without it. We estimate that by 2009,
nearly all sectors in the US economy had at least an average of 200 terabytes of
stored data (twice the size of US retailer Wal-Mart’s data warehouse in 1999) per
company with more than 1,000 employees. Many sectors had more than 1 petabyte
in mean stored data per company. In total, European organizations have about
70 percent of the storage capacity of the entire United States at almost 11 exabytes
compared with more than 16 exabytes in 2010. Given that European economies
are similar to each other in terms of their stage of development and thus their
distribution of firms, we believe that the average company in most industries in
Europe has enough capacity to store and manipulate big data. In contrast, the per
capita data intensity in other regions is much lower. This suggests that, in the near
term at least, the most potential to create value through the use of big data will be in
the most developed economies. Looking ahead, however, there is huge potential
to leverage big data in developing economies as long as the right conditions are in
place. Consider, for instance, the fact that Asia is already the leading region for the
generation of personal location data simply because so many mobile phones are
in use there. More mobile phones—an estimated 800 million devices in 2010—are
in use in China than in any other country. Further, some individual companies in
developing regions could be far more advanced in their use of big data than averages
might suggest. And some organizations will take advantage of the ability to store and
process data remotely.
The possibilities of big data continue to evolve rapidly, driven by innovation in the
underlying technologies, platforms, and analytic capabilities for handling data, as
well as the evolution of behavior among its users as more and more individuals live
digital lives.

2. BIG DATA CREATES VALUE IN SEVERAL WAYS
We have identified five broadly applicable ways to leverage big data that offer
transformational potential to create value and have implications for how organizations
will have to be designed, organized, and managed. For example, in a world in which
large-scale experimentation is possible, how will corporate marketing functions
and activities have to evolve? How will business processes change, and how will
companies value and leverage their assets (particularly data assets)? Could a
company’s access to, and ability to analyze, data potentially confer more value than
a brand? What existing business models are likely to be disrupted? For example,
what happens to industries predicated on information asymmetry—e.g., various
types of brokers—in a world of radical data transparency? How will incumbents tied
to legacy business models and infrastructures compete with agile new attackers that
are able to quickly process and take advantage of detailed consumer data that is
rapidly becoming available, e.g., what they say in social media or what sensors report
they are doing in the world? And what happens when surplus starts shifting from

7 For another comparison of data generation versus storage, see John F. Gantz, David Reinsel,
Christopher Chute, Wolfgang Schlichting, John McArthur, Stephen Minton, Irida Xheneti, Anna
Toncheva, and Alex Manfrediz, The expanding digital universe, IDC white paper, sponsored
by EMC, March 2007.


suppliers to customers, as they become empowered by their own access to data,
e.g., comparisons of prices and quality across competitors?
Creating transparency
Simply making big data more easily accessible to relevant stakeholders in a timely
manner can create tremendous value. In the public sector, for example, making
relevant data more readily accessible across otherwise separated departments can
sharply reduce search and processing time. In manufacturing, integrating data from
RD, engineering, and manufacturing units to enable concurrent engineering can
significantly cut time to market and improve quality.
Enabling experimentation to discover needs, expose variability, and
improve performance
As they create and store more transactional data in digital form, organizations can
collect more accurate and detailed performance data (in real or near real time) on
everything from product inventories to personnel sick days. IT enables organizations
to instrument processes and then set up controlled experiments. Using data to
analyze variability in performance—that which either occurs naturally or is generated
by controlled experiments—and to understand its root causes can enable leaders to
manage performance to higher levels.
Segmenting populations to customize actions
Big data allows organizations to create highly specific segmentations and to
tailor products and services precisely to meet those needs. This approach is well
known in marketing and risk management but can be revolutionary elsewhere—for
example, in the public sector where an ethos of treating all citizens in the same way
is commonplace. Even consumer goods and service companies that have used
segmentation for many years are beginning to deploy ever more sophisticated big
data techniques such as the real-time microsegmentation of customers to target
promotions and advertising.
Replacing/supporting human decision making with automated
algorithms
Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks,
and unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden. Such analytics
have applications for organizations from tax agencies that can use automated risk
engines to flag candidates for further examination to retailers that can use algorithms
to optimize decision processes such as the automatic fine-tuning of inventories and
pricing in response to real-time in-store and online sales. In some cases, decisions
will not necessarily be automated but augmented by analyzing huge, entire datasets
using big data techniques and technologies rather than just smaller samples that
individuals with spreadsheets can handle and understand. Decision making may
never be the same; some organizations are already making better decisions by
analyzing entire datasets from customers, employees, or even sensors embedded in
products.
Innovating new business models, products, and services
Big data enables companies to create new products and services, enhance existing
ones, and invent entirely new business models. Manufacturers are using data
obtained from the use of actual products to improve the development of the next
generation of products and to create innovative after-sales service offerings. The
emergence of real-time location data has created an entirely new set of location-

5

6

based services from navigation to pricing property and casualty insurance based on
where, and how, people drive their cars.

3. USE OF BIG DATA WILL BECOME A KEY BASIS OF COMPETITION
AND GROWTH FOR INDIVIDUAL FIRMS
The use of big data is becoming a key way for leading companies to outperform their
peers. For example, we estimate that a retailer embracing big data has the potential
to increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. We have seen leading
retailers such as the United Kingdom’s Tesco use big data to capture market share
from its local competitors, and many other examples abound in industries such as
financial services and insurance. Across sectors, we expect to see value accruing to
leading users of big data at the expense of laggards, a trend for which the emerging
evidence is growing stronger.8 Forward-thinking leaders can begin to aggressively
build their organizations’ big data capabilities. This effort will take time, but the impact
of developing a superior capacity to take advantage of big data will confer enhanced
competitive advantage over the long term and is therefore well worth the investment
to create this capability. But the converse is also true. In a big data world, a competitor
that fails to sufficiently develop its capabilities will be left behind.
Big data will also help to create new growth opportunities and entirely new categories
of companies, such as those that aggregate and analyze industry data. Many of
these will be companies that sit in the middle of large information flows where data
about products and services, buyers and suppliers, and consumer preferences and
intent can be captured and analyzed. Examples are likely to include companies that
interface with large numbers of consumers buying a wide range of products and
services, companies enabling global supply chains, companies that process millions of
transactions, and those that provide platforms for consumer digital experiences. These
will be the big-data-advantaged businesses. More businesses will find themselves with
some kind of big data advantage than one might at first think. Many companies have
access to valuable pools of data generated by their products and services. Networks
will even connect physical products, enabling those products to report their own serial
numbers, ship dates, number of times used, and so on.
Some of these opportunities will generate new sources of value; others will cause
major shifts in value within industries. For example, medical clinical information
providers, which aggregate data and perform the analyses necessary to improve
health care efficiency, could compete in a market worth more than $10 billion by
2020. Early movers that secure access to the data necessary to create value are
likely to reap the most benefit (see Box 2, “How do we measure the value of big
data?”). From the standpoint of competitiveness and the potential capture of value,
all companies need to take big data seriously. In most industries, established
competitors and new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate,
compete, and capture value. Indeed, we found early examples of such use of data in
every sector we examined.

8 Erik Brynjolfsson, Lorin M. Hitt, and Heekyung Hellen Kim, Strength in numbers: How does
data-driven decisionmaking affect firm performance?, April 22, 2011, available at SSRN (ssrn.
com/abstract=1819486).


Box 2. How do we measure the value of big data?
When we set out to size the potential of big data to create value, we considered
only those actions that essentially depend on the use of big data—i.e., actions
where the use of big data is necessary (but usually not sufficient) to execute
a particular lever. We did not include the value of levers that consist only of
automation but do not involve big data (e.g., productivity increases from
replacing bank tellers with ATMs). Note also that we include the gross value
of levers that require the use of big data. We did not attempt to estimate big
data’s relative contribution to the value generated by a particular lever but rather
estimated the total value created.

4. THE USE OF BIG DATA WILL UNDERPIN NEW WAVES OF
PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH AND CONSUMER SURPLUS
Across the five domains we studied, we identified many big data levers that will, in our
view, underpin substantial productivity growth (Exhibit 1). These opportunities have
the potential to improve efficiency and effectiveness, enabling organizations both
to do more with less and to produce higher-quality outputs, i.e., increase the valueadded content of products and services.9 For example, we found that companies can
leverage data to design products that better match customer needs. Data can even
be leveraged to improve products as they are used. An example is a mobile phone
that has learned its owner’s habits and preferences, that holds applications and
data tailored to that particular user’s needs, and that will therefore be more valuable
than a new device that is not customized to a user’s needs.10 Capturing this potential
requires innovation in operations and processes. Examples include augmenting
decision making—from clinical practice to tax audits—with algorithms as well as
making innovations in products and services, such as accelerating the development
of new drugs by using advanced analytics and creating new, proactive after-sales
maintenance service for automobiles through the use of networked sensors. Policy
makers who understand that accelerating productivity within sectors is the key lever
for increasing the standard of living in their economies as a whole need to ease the
way for organizations to take advantage of big data levers that enhance productivity.
We also find a general pattern in which customers, consumers, and citizens capture
a large amount of the economic surplus that big data enables—they are both direct
and indirect beneficiaries of big-data-related innovation.11 For example, the use of big
data can enable improved health outcomes, higher-quality civic engagement with
government, lower prices due to price transparency, and a better match between
products and consumer needs. We expect this trend toward enhanced consumer
surplus to continue and accelerate across all sectors as they deploy big data. Take
the area of personal location data as illustration. In this area, the use of real-time traffic
information to inform navigation will create a quantifiable consumer surplus through
9 Note that the effectiveness improvement is not captured in some of the productivity
calculations because of a lack of precision in some metrics such as improved health outcomes
or better matching the needs of consumers with goods in retail services. Thus, in many cases,
our productivity estimates are likely to be conservative.
10 Hal Varian has described the ability of products to leverage data to improve with use as
“product kaizen.” See Hal Varian, Computer mediated transactions, 2010 Ely Lecture at the
American Economics Association meeting, Atlanta, Georgia.
11 Professor Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has noted that the
creation of large amounts of consumer surplus, not captured in traditional economic metrics
such as GDP, is a characteristic of the deployment of IT.

7

8

savings on the time spent traveling and on fuel consumption. Mobile location-enabled
applications will create surplus from consumers, too. In both cases, the surplus these
innovations create is likely to far exceed the revenue generated by service providers.
For consumers to benefit, policy makers will often need to push the deployment of big
data innovations.
Exhibit 1
Big data can generate significant financial value across sectors

US health care

▪
▪

$300 billion value
per year
~0.7 percent annual
productivity growth

Europe public sector
administration

▪
▪

US retail

▪
▪

€250 billion value per year
~0.5 percent annual
productivity growth

60+% increase in net margin
possible
0.5–1.0 percent annual
productivity growth

Global personal
location data

▪
▪

$100 billion+ revenue for
service providers
Up to $700 billion value to
end users

Manufacturing

▪
▪

Up to 50 percent decrease in
product development,
assembly costs
Up to 7 percent reduction in
working capital

SOURCE: McKinsey Global Institute analysis

5. WHILE THE USE OF BIG DATA WILL MATTER ACROSS SECTORS,
SOME SECTORS ARE POISED FOR GREATER GAINS
Illustrating differences among different sectors, if we compare the historical
productivity of sectors in the United States with the potential of these sectors to
capture value from big data (using an index that combines several quantitative
metrics), we observe that patterns vary from sector to sector (Exhibit 2).12

12 The index consists of five metrics that are designed as proxies to indicate (1) the amount of
data available for use and analysis; (2) variability in performance; (3) number of stakeholders
(customers and suppliers) with which an organization deals on average; (4) transaction
intensity; and (5) turbulence inherent in a sector. We believe that these are the characteristics
that make a sector more or less likely to take advantage of the five transformative big data
opportunities. See the appendix for further details.


9

Exhibit 2
Cluster A

9.0
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
0.5
0
-0.5
-1.0
-1.5
-2.0
-2.5
-3.0
-3.5
Low

Cluster E

Cluster C

Historical productivity growth in the United States, 2000–08
%

24.0
23.5
23.0
22.5

Cluster D

Cluster B

Some sectors are positioned for greater gains from
the use of big data

Bubble sizes denote
relative sizes of GDP

Computer and electronic products

Information

Administration, support, and
waste management

Wholesale trade
Manufacturing
Transportation and warehousing
Finance and insurance
Professional services
Real estate and rental
Utilities

Health care providers

Retail trade
Accommodation and food
Arts and entertainment

Government
Natural resources

Management of companies
Other services

Educational services

Construction

Big data value potential index1

High

1 See appendix for detailed definitions and metrics used for value potential index.
SOURCE: US Bureau of Labor Statistics; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

Computer and electronic products and information sectors (Cluster A), traded
globally, stand out as sectors that have already been experiencing very strong
productivity growth and that are poised to gain substantially from the use of big data.
Two services sectors (Cluster B)—finance and insurance and government—are
positioned to benefit very strongly from big data as long as barriers to its use can
be overcome. Several sectors (Cluster C) have experienced negative productivity
growth, probably indicating that these sectors face strong systemic barriers to
increasing productivity. Among the remaining sectors, we see that globally traded
sectors (mostly Cluster D) tend to have experienced higher historical productivity
growth, while local services (mainly Cluster E) have experienced lower growth.
While all sectors will have to overcome barriers to capture value from the use of
big data, barriers are structurally higher for some than for others (Exhibit 3). For
example, the public sector, including education, faces higher hurdles because of a
lack of data-driven mind-set and available data. Capturing value in health care faces
challenges given the relatively low IT investment performed so far. Sectors such as
retail, manufacturing, and professional services may have relatively lower degrees of
barriers to overcome for precisely the opposite reasons.

10

Exhibit 3
A heat map shows the relative ease
of capturing the value potential
across sectors
Categories

Sectors

Overall
ease of
capture
index1

Top quintile
(easiest to capture)

4th quintile

2nd quintile

Bottom quintile
(most difficult) to capture)

3rd quintile

No data available

Talent

IT intensity

Data-driven Data
mind-set
availability

Manufacturing

Goods

Construction
Natural resources
Real estate, rental, and leasing
Wholesale trade
Information

Services

Retail trade
Administrative, support, waste management,
and remediation services
Accommodation and food services
Other services (except public administration)
Arts, entertainment, and recreation
Finance and Insurance
Professional, scientific, and technical services

Regulated
and public

Management of companies and enterprises
Government
Health care and social assistance
Utilities

1 See appendix for detailed definitions and metrics used for each of the criteria.

6. THERE WILL BE A SHORTAGE OF TALENT NECESSARY FOR
ORGANIZATIONS TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF BIG DATA
A significant constraint on realizing value from big data will be a shortage of talent,
particularly of people with deep expertise in statistics and machine learning, and the
managers and analysts who know how to operate companies by using insights from
big data.
In the United States, we expect big data to rapidly become a key determinant of
competition across sectors. But we project that demand for deep analytical positions
in a big data world could exceed the supply being produced on current trends by
140,000 to 190,000 positions (Exhibit 4). Furthermore, this type of talent is difficult to
produce, taking years of training in the case of someone with intrinsic mathematical
abilities. Although our quantitative analysis uses the United States as illustration, we
believe that the constraint on this type of talent will be global, with the caveat that
some regions may be able to produce the supply that can fill talent gaps in other
regions.
In addition, we project a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in
the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the
analysis of big data effectively. The United States—and other economies facing
similar shortages—cannot fill this gap simply by changing graduate requirements
and waiting for people to graduate with more skills or by importing talent (although
these could be important actions to take). It will be necessary to retrain a significant
amount of the talent in place; fortunately, this level of training does not require years of
dedicated study.


11

Exhibit 4
Demand for deep analytical talent in the United States could be
50 to 60 percent greater than its projected supply by 2018

Supply and demand of deep analytical talent by 2018
Thousand people

140–190

180

30

300

50–60% gap
relative to
2018 supply

150

2008
employment

440–490

Graduates
with deep
analytical
talent

Others1

2018 supply

Talent gap

2018 projected
demand

1 Other supply drivers include attrition (-), immigration (+), and reemploying previously unemployed deep analytical talent (+).
SOURCE: US Bureau of Labor Statistics; US Census; Dun Bradstreet; company interviews; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

7. SEVERAL ISSUES WILL HAVE TO BE ADDRESSED TO CAPTURE
THE FULL POTENTIAL OF BIG DATA
Data policies. As an ever larger amount of data is digitized and travels across
organizational boundaries, there is a set of policy issues that will become increasingly
important, including, but not limited to, privacy, security, intellectual property, and
liability. Clearly, privacy is an issue whose importance, particularly to consumers,
is growing as the value of big data becomes more apparent. Personal data such
as health and financial records are often those that can offer the most significant
human benefits, such as helping to pinpoint the right medical treatment or the most
appropriate financial product. However, consumers also view these categories of
data as being the most sensitive. It is clear that individuals and the societies in which
they live will have to grapple with trade-offs between privacy and utility.
Another closely related concern is data security, e.g., how to protect competitively
sensitive data or other data that should be kept private. Recent examples have
demonstrated that data breaches can expose not only personal consumer
information and confidential corporate information but even national security secrets.
With serious breaches on the rise, addressing data security through technological
and policy tools will become essential.13
Big data’s increasing economic importance also raises a number of legal issues,
especially when coupled with the fact that data are fundamentally different from many
other assets. Data can be copied perfectly and easily combined with other data. The
same piece of data can be used simultaneously by more than one person. All of these
are unique characteristics of data compared with physical assets. Questions about
the intellectual property rights attached to data will have to be answered: Who “owns”
a piece of data and what rights come attached with a dataset? What defines “fair
use” of data? There are also questions related to liability: Who is responsible when an
13 Data privacy and security are being studied and debated at great length elsewhere, so we
have not made these topics the focus of the research reported here.

12

inaccurate piece of data leads to negative consequences? Such types of legal issues
will need clarification, probably over time, to capture the full potential of big data.
Technology and techniques. To capture value from big data, organizations will
have to deploy new technologies (e.g., storage, computing, and analytical software)
and techniques (i.e., new types of analyses). The range of technology challenges
and the priorities set for tackling them will differ depending on the data maturity
of the institution. Legacy systems and incompatible standards and formats too
often prevent the integration of data and the more sophisticated analytics that
create value from big data. New problems and growing computing power will spur
the development of new analytical techniques. There is also a need for ongoing
innovation in technologies and techniques that will help individuals and organizations
to integrate, analyze, visualize, and consume the growing torrent of big data.
Organizational change and talent. Organizational leaders often lack the
understanding of the value in big data as well as how to unlock this value. In
competitive sectors this may prove to be an Achilles heel for some companies since
their established competitors as well as new entrants are likely to leverage big data to
compete against them. And, as we have discussed, many organizations do not have
the talent in place to derive insights from big data. In addition, many organizations
today do not structure workflows and incentives in ways that optimize the use of big
data to make better decisions and take more informed action.
Access to data. To enable transformative opportunities, companies will increasingly
need to integrate information from multiple data sources. In some cases,
organizations will be able to purchase access to the data. In other cases, however,
gaining access to third-party data is often not straightforward. The sources of thirdparty data might not have considered sharing it. Sometimes, economic incentives
are not aligned to encourage stakeholders to share data. A stakeholder that holds a
certain dataset might consider it to be the source of a key competitive advantage and
thus would be reluctant to share it with other stakeholders. Other stakeholders must
find ways to offer compelling value propositions to holders of valuable data.
Industry structure. Sectors with a relative lack of competitive intensity and
performance transparency, along with industries where profit pools are highly
concentrated, are likely to be slow to fully leverage the benefits of big data. For
example, in the public sector, there tends to be a lack of competitive pressure that
limits efficiency and productivity; as a result, the sector faces more difficult barriers
than other sectors in the way of capturing the potential value from using big data. US
health care is another example of how the structure of an industry impacts on how
easy it will be to extract value from big data. This is a sector that not only has a lack
of performance transparency into cost and quality but also an industry structure in
which payors will gain (from fewer payouts for unnecessary treatment) from the use
of clinical data. However, the gains accruing to payors will be at the expense of the
providers (fewer medical activities to charge for) from whom the payors would have to
obtain the clinical data. As these examples suggest, organization leaders and policy
makers will have to consider how industry structures could evolve in a big data world
if they are to determine how to optimize value creation at the level of individual firms,
sectors, and economies as a whole.


  
The effective use of big data has the potential to transform economies, delivering a
new wave of productivity growth and consumer surplus. Using big data will become a
key basis of competition for existing companies, and will create new competitors who
are able to attract employees that have the critical skills for a big data world. Leaders
of organizations need to recognize the potential opportunity as well as the strategic
threats that big data represent and should assess and then close any gap between
their current IT capabilities and their data strategy and what is necessary to capture
big data opportunities relevant to their enterprise. They will need to be creative and
proactive in determining which pools of data they can combine to create value and
how to gain access to those pools, as well as addressing security and privacy issues.
On the topic of privacy and security, part of the task could include helping consumers
to understand what benefits the use of big data offers, along with the risks. In parallel,
companies need to recruit and retain deep analytical talent and retrain their analyst
and management ranks to become more data savvy, establishing a culture that
values and rewards the use of big data in decision making.
Policy makers need to recognize the potential of harnessing big data to unleash
the next wave of growth in their economies. They need to provide the institutional
framework to allow companies to easily create value out of data while protecting the
privacy of citizens and providing data security. They also have a significant role to
play in helping to mitigate the shortage of talent through education and immigration
policy and putting in place technology enablers including infrastructure such
as communication networks; accelerating research in selected areas including
advanced analytics; and creating an intellectual property framework that encourages
innovation. Creative solutions to align incentives may also be necessary, including, for
instance, requirements to share certain data to promote the public welfare.

13


1. Mapping global data: Growth and
value creation

Many of the most powerful inventions throughout human history, from language to
the modern computer, were those that enabled people to better generate, capture,
and consume data and information.14 We have witnessed explosive growth in the
amount of data in our world. Big data has reached critical mass in every sector and
function of the typical economy, and the rapid development and diffusion of digital
information technologies have intensified its growth.
We estimate that new data stored by enterprises exceeded 7 exabytes of data
globally in 2010 and that new data stored by consumers around the world that year
exceeded an additional 6 exabytes.15 To put these very large numbers in context, the
data that companies and individuals are producing and storing is equivalent to filling
more than 60,000 US Libraries of Congress. If all words spoken by humans were
digitized as text, they would total about 5 exabytes—less than the new data stored
by consumers in a year.16 The increasing volume and detail of information captured
by enterprises, together with the rise of multimedia, social media, and the Internet of
Things will fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable future.
There is no doubt that the sheer size and rapidly expanding universe of big data are
phenomena in themselves and have been the primary focus of research thus far.
But the key question is what broader impact this torrent of data might have. Many
consumers are suspicious about the amount of data that is collected about every
aspect of their lives, from how they shop to how healthy they are. Is big data simply a
sign of how intrusive society has become, or can big data, in fact, play a useful role in
economic terms that can benefit all societal stakeholders?
The emphatic answer is that data can indeed create significant value for the world
economy, potentially enhancing the productivity and competitiveness of companies
and creating a substantial economic surplus for consumers and their governments.
Building on MGI’s deep background in analyzing productivity and competitiveness
around the world, this research explores a fresh linkage between data and
productivity. Although the relationship between productivity and IT investments
is well established, exploring the link between productivity and data breaks new
ground. Based on our findings, we believe that the global economy is on the cusp of a
new wave of productivity growth enabled by big data.
In this chapter, we look at past and current research on sizing big data and its storage
capacity. We then explore the likely relationship between big data and productivity,
drawing on past analyses of the impact of IT investment and innovation to drive
14 For an interesting perspective on this topic, see James Gleick, The information: A history. A
theory. A flood (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2011).
15 Our definition of new data stored describes the amount of digital storage newly taken up by
data in a year. Note that this differs from Hal Varian and Peter Lyman’s definition of new data
stored as our methodology does not take into account data created and stored but then
written over in a year. See the appendix for further details
16 Peter Lyman and Hal R. Varian, How much information? 2003, School of Information
Management and Systems, University of California at Berkeley, 2003.

15

16

productivity that we believe is directly applicable to the current and likely future
evolution of big data.

THE VOLUME OF DATA IS GROWING AT AN EXPONENTIAL RATE
MGI is the latest of several research groups to study the amount of data that enterprises
and individuals are generating, storing, and consuming throughout the global economy.
All analyses, each with different methodologies and definitions, agree on one fundamental
point—the amount of data in the world has been expanding rapidly and will continue to grow
exponentially for the foreseeable future (see Box 3, “Measuring data”) despite there being a
question mark over how much data we, as human beings, can absorb (see Box 4, “Human
beings may have limits in their ability to consume and understand big data” on page 18).

Box 3. Measuring data
Measuring volumes of data provokes a number of methodological questions.
First, how can we distinguish data from information and from insight? Common
definitions describe data as being raw indicators, information as the meaningful
interpretation of those signals, and insight as an actionable piece of knowledge.
For the purposes of sizing big data in this research, we focused primarily on data
sized in terms of bytes. But a second question then arises. When using bytes,
what types of encoding should we use? In other words, what is the amount of
assumed compression in the encoding? We have chosen to assume the most
common encoding methods used for each type of data.
Hal Varian and Peter Lyman at the University of California Berkeley were pioneers
in the research into the amount of data produced, stored, and transmitted. As part
of their “How much information?” project that ran from 2000 to 2003, the authors
estimated that 5 exabytes of new data were stored globally in 2002 (92 percent on
magnetic media) and that more than three times that amount—18 exabytes—of new
or original data were transmitted, but not necessarily stored, through electronic
channels such as telephone, radio, television, and the Internet. Most important,
they estimated that the amount of new data stored doubled from 1999 to 2002, a
compound annual growth rate of 25 percent.
Then, starting in 2007, the information-management company EMC sponsored the
research firm IDC to produce an annual series of reports on the “Digital Universe”
to size the amount of digital information created and replicated each year.17 This
analysis showed that in 2007, the amount of digital data created in a year exceeded the
world’s data storage capacity for the first time. In short, there was no way to actually
store all of the digital data being created. They also found that the rate at which data
generation is increasing is much faster than the world’s data storage capacity is
expanding, pointing strongly to the continued widening of the gap between the two.
Their analysis estimated that the total amount of data created and replicated in 2009
was 800 exabytes—enough to fill a stack of DVDs reaching to the moon and back. They
projected that this volume would grow by 44 times to 2020, an implied annual growth
rate of 40 percent.18
17 IDC has published a series of white papers, sponsored by EMC, including The expanding
digital universe, March 2007; The diverse and exploding digital universe, March 2008; As
the economy contracts, the digital universe expands, May 2009; and The digital universe
decade—Are you ready?, May 2010. All are available at www.emc.com/leadership/programs/
digital-universe.htm.
18 The IDC estimates of the volume of data include copies of data, not just originally generated
data.


17

Most recently, Martin Hilbert and Priscila López published a paper in Science that analyzed
total global storage and computing capacity from 1986 to 2007.19 Their analysis showed
that while global storage capacity grew at an annual rate of 23 percent over that period
(to more than 290 exabytes in 2007 for all analog and digital media), general-purpose
computing capacity, a measure of the ability to generate and process data, grew at a much
higher annual rate of 58 percent. Their study also documented the rise of digitization. They
estimated that the percentage of data stored in digital form increased from only 25 percent
in 2000 (analog forms such as books, photos, and audio/video tapes making up the bulk of
data storage capacity at that time) to a dominant 94 percent share in 2007 as media such
as hard drives, CDs, and digital tapes grew in importance (Exhibits 5 and 6).
Exhibit 5
Data storage has grown significantly, shifting markedly from analog to
digital after 2000
Global installed, optimally compressed, storage
Overall
Exabytes

Detail
%; exabytes

300

100% =
Digital

3
1

54

16
3

250

295

25

200
150

99

Analog

94

97
75

100
50
0
1986

6

1993

2000

2007

1986

2000

1993

2007

NOTE: Numbers may not sum due to rounding.
SOURCE: Hilbert and López, “The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information,” Science,
2011

Exhibit 6
Computation capacity has also risen sharply
Global installed computation to handle information
Overall
1012 million instructions per second

Pocket calculators

6.5
6.0
5.5

100%

5.0
4.5

41

4.0

Video game consoles

Servers and
mainframes

0.001

Mobile phones/PDA

Supercomputers

Detail
%; 1012 million
instructions
per second

Personal computers

0.004
6
23

0.289
6
3
5

6.379
3

6

25

6

3.5
3.0
17

2.5
2.0

9

1.5
1.0

66

33

0.5
0
1986

86
64

1993

2000

2007

1986

1993

2000

2007

SOURCE: Hilbert and López, “The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information,” Science,
2011

19 Martin Hilbert and Priscila López, “The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate,
and compute information,” Science, February 10, 2011.

18

Box 4. Human beings may have limits in their ability to consume
and understand big data
The generation of big data may be growing exponentially and advancing
technology may allow the global economy to store and process ever greater
quantities of data, but there may be limits to our innate human ability—our
sensory and cognitive faculties—to process this data torrent. It is said that
the mind can handle about seven pieces of information in its short-term
memory.1 Roger Bohn and James Short at the University of California at San
Diego discovered that the rate of growth in data consumed by consumers,
through various types of media, was a relatively modest 2.8 percent in bytes
per hour between 1980 and 2008. We should note that one of the reasons for
this slow growth was the relatively fixed number of bytes delivered through
television before the widespread adoption of high-definition digital video. 2
The topic of information overload has been widely studied by academics from
neuroscientists to economists. Economist Herbert Simon once said, “A wealth
of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention
efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might
consume it.”3
Despite these apparent limits, there are ways to help organizations and
individuals to process, visualize, and synthesize meaning from big data. For
instance, more sophisticated visualization techniques and algorithms, including
automated algorithms, can enable people to see patterns in large amounts of
data and help them to unearth the most pertinent insights (see chapter 2 for
examples of visualization). Advancing collaboration technology also allows a
large number of individuals, each of whom may possess understanding of a
special area of information, to come together in order to create a whole picture
to tackle interdisciplinary problems. If organizations and individuals deployed
such techniques more widely, end-user demand for big data could strengthen
significantly.
1 George A. Miller, “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our
capacity for processing information,” Psychological Review, Volume 63(2), March 1956:
81–97.
2 Roger Bohn and James Short, How much information? 2009: Report on American
consumers, University of California, San Diego, Global Information Industry Center,
January 2010.
3 Herbert A. Simon, “Designing organizations for an information-rich world,” in Martin
Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The
Johns Hopkins Press, 1971.

THE INTENSITY OF BIG DATA VARIES ACROSS SECTORS BUT HAS
REACHED CRITICAL MASS IN EVERY SECTOR
There is broad agreement that data generation has been growing exponentially. Has
that growth been concentrated only in certain segments of the global economy? The
answer to that question is no. The growth of big data is a phenomenon that we have
observed in every sector. More important, data intensity—i.e., the average amount
of data stored per company—across sectors in the global economy is sufficient for
companies to use techniques enabled by large datasets to drive value (although
some sectors had significantly higher data intensity than others). Business leaders
across sectors are now beginning to ask themselves how they can better derive value


19

from their data assets, but we would argue that leaders in sectors with high data
intensity in particular should make examining the potential a high priority.
MGI estimates that enterprises around the world used more than 7 exabytes of
incremental disk drive data storage capacity in 2010; nearly 80 percent of that total
appeared to duplicate data that had been stored elsewhere.20 We also analyzed
data generation and storage at the level of sectors and individual firms. We estimate
that, by 2009, nearly all sectors in the US economy had at least an average of
200 terabytes of stored data per company (for companies with more than 1,000
employees) and that many sectors had more than 1 petabyte in mean stored data per
company. Some individual companies have far higher stored data than their sector
average, potentially giving them more potential to capture value from big data.
Some sectors Exhibit far higher levels of data intensity than others, implying that
they have more near-term potential to capture value from big data. Financial services
sectors, including securities and investment services and banking, have the most
digital data stored per firm on average. This probably reflects the fact that firms involved
in these sectors tend to be transaction-intensive (the New York Stock Exchange, for
instance, boasts about half a trillion trades a month) and that, on average, these types
of sectors tend to have a preponderance of large firms. Communications and media
firms, utilities, and government also have significant digital data stored per enterprise or
organization, which appears to reflect the fact that such entities have a high volume of
operations and multimedia data. Discrete and process manufacturing have the highest
aggregate data stored in bytes. However, these sectors rank much lower in intensity
terms, since they are fragmented into a large number of firms. Because individual firms
often do not share data, the value they can obtain from big data could be constrained
by the degree to which they can pool data across manufacturing supply chains (see
chapter 3d on manufacturing for more detail) (Exhibit 7).
Exhibit 7
Companies in all sectors have at least 100 terabytes of stored data in the
United States; many have more than 1 petabyte
Stored data in the
United States, 20091
Petabytes

Number of firms with
1,000 employees2

966

Discrete manufacturing3
Government

1,792

694

Banking

619

399

Securities and investment services

429


1,931

321
1,172

411

Retail
Education

8312

835

434

Health care providers3

1,312

647

715

Process manufacturing3

9672

1,000

848

Communications and media

Stored data per firm
(1,000 employees), 2009
Terabytes

370

3,866

111
1,478

364

278
697

522

269

843

319

Insurance

243

280

870

Transportation

227

283

801

Wholesale

202

Utilities

194

Resource industries
Consumer recreational services
Construction

116
106
51

536

376

1,507

129
825

140
708
222

150
231

1 Storage data by sector derived from IDC.
2 Firm data split into sectors, when needed, using employment
3 The particularly large number of firms in manufacturing and health care provider sectors make the available storage per
company much smaller.
SOURCE: IDC; US Bureau of Labor Statistics; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

20 This is an estimate of the additional capacity utilized during the year. In some cases, this
capacity could consist of multiple sets of data overwriting other data, but the capacity usage
is incremental over the storage capacity used the previous year.

20

In addition to variations in the amount of data stored in different sectors, the types
of data generated and stored—i.e., whether the data encodes video, images,
audio, or text/numeric information—also differ markedly from industry to industry.
For instance, financial services, administrative parts of government, and retail and
wholesale all generate significant amounts of text and numerical data including
customer data, transaction information, and mathematical modeling and simulations
(Exhibit 8). Other sectors such as manufacturing, health care, and communications
and media are responsible for higher percentages of multimedia data. Manufacturing
generates a great deal of text and numerical data in its production processes, but
RD and engineering functions in many manufacturing subsectors are heavy users of
image data used in design.
Image data in the form of X-rays, CT, and other scans dominate data storage volumes
in health care. While a single page of records can total a kilobyte, a single image can
require 20 to 200 megabytes or more to store. In the communications and media
industries, byte-hungry images and audio dominate storage volumes. Indeed, if we
were to examine pure data generation (rather than storage), some subsectors such as
health care and gaming generate even more multimedia data in the form of real-time
procedure and surveillance video, respectively, but this is rarely stored for long.
Exhibit 8
The type of data generated and stored varies by sector1
Video

Image

Audio

Banking

Penetration

Text/
numbers

High
Medium
Low

Insurance
Securities and investment services
Discrete manufacturing
Process manufacturing
Retail
Wholesale
Consumer and recreational services
Health care
Transportation
Communications and media2
Utilities
Construction
Resource industries
Government
Education
1 We compiled this heat map using units of data (in files or minutes of video) rather than bytes.
2 Video and audio are high in some subsectors.

Turning to a geographic profile of where big data are stored, North America and
Europe together lead the pack with a combined 70 percent of the global total
currently. However, both developed and emerging markets are expected to
experience strong growth in data storage and, by extension, data generation at rates
of anywhere between 35 and 45 percent a year. An effort to profile the distribution
of data around the world needs to take into account that data are not always stored
in the country where they are generated; data centers in one region can store and
analyze data generated in another.


MAJOR ESTABLISHED TRENDS WILL CONTINUE TO DRIVE DATA
GROWTH
Across sectors and regions, several cross-cutting trends have fueled growth in data
generation and will continue to propel the rapidly expanding pools of data. These
trends include growth in traditional transactional databases, continued expansion
of multimedia content, increasing popularity of social media, and proliferation of
applications of sensors in the Internet of Things.
Enterprises are collecting data with greater granularity and frequency, capturing
every customer transaction, attaching more personal information, and also collecting
more information about consumer behavior in many different environments. This
activity simultaneously increases the need for more storage and analytical capacity.
Tesco, for instance, generates more than 1.5 billion new items of data every month.
Wal-Mart’s warehouse now includes some 2.5 petabytes of information, the
equivalent of roughly half of all the letters delivered by the US Postal Service in 2010.
The increasing use of multimedia in sectors including health care and consumer-facing
industries has contributed significantly to the growth of big data and will continue to
do so. Videos generate a tremendous amount of data. Every minute of the now most
commonly used high-resolution video in surgeries generates 25 times the data volume
(per minute) of even the highest resolution still images such as CT scans, and each of
those still images already requires thousands of times more bytes than a single page
of text or numerical data. More than 95 percent of the clinical data generated in health
care is now video. Multimedia data already accounts for more than half of Internet
backbone traffic (i.e., the traffic carried on the largest connections between major
Internet networks), and this share is expected to grow to 70 percent by 2013.21
The surge in the use of social media is producing its own stream of new data. While social
networks dominate the communications portfolios of younger users, older users are
adopting them at an even more rapid pace. McKinsey surveyed users of digital services
and found a 7 percent increase in 2009 in use of social networks by people aged 25 to
34, an even more impressive 21 to 22 percent increase among those aged 35 to 54, and
an eye-opening 52 percent increase in usage among those aged 55 to 64. The rapid
adoption of smartphones is also driving up the usage of social networking (Exhibit 9).
Facebook’s 600 million active users spend more than 9.3 billion hours a month on
the site—if Facebook were a country, it would have the third-largest population in the
world. Every month, the average Facebook user creates 90 pieces of content and the
network itself shares more than 30 billion items of content including photos, notes, blog
posts, Web links, and news stories. YouTube says it has some 490 million unique visitors
worldwide who spend more than 2.9 billion hours on the site each month. YouTube
claims to upload 24 hours of video every minute, making the site a hugely significant data
aggregator. McKinsey has also documented how the use of social media and Web 2.0
has been migrating from the consumer realm into the enterprise.22
Increasing applications of the Internet of Things, i.e., sensors and devices embedded
in the physical world and connected by networks to computing resources, is another
trend driving growth in big data.23 McKinsey research projects that the number of

21 IDC Internet consumer traffic analysis, 2010.
22 Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger Roberts. Six ways to make Web 2.0 work,” McKinsey
Quarterly, February 2009; Jaques Bughin and Michael Chui, “The rise of the networked
enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday,” McKinsey Quarterly. December 2010.
23 Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of Things,” McKinsey
Quarterly, March 2010.

21

22

connected nodes in the Internet of Things—sometimes also referred to as machineto-machine (M2M) devices—deployed in the world will grow at a rate exceeding
30 percent annually over the next five years (Exhibit 10). Some of the growth sectors
are expected to be utilities as these operators install more smart meters and smart
appliances; health care, as the sector deploys remote health monitoring; retail, which
will eventually increase its use of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags; and the
automotive industry, which will increasingly install sensors in vehicles.
Exhibit 9
The penetration of social networks is increasing online
and on smartphones; frequent users are increasing
as a share of total users1
Social networking penetration on the PC is
slowing, but frequent users are still increasing
% of respondents
+11% p.a.
63
55

Social networking penetration of smartphones
has nearly doubled since 2008
% of smartphone users
+28% p.a.

67

12

14

47

13

%
Frequent
users

13

12

55

49

57

14

35

41

Frequent user2

33

23

2008

2009

2010

76

78

82

%
Frequent
users

44

2008

2009

2010

65

70

77

1 Based on penetration of users who browse social network sites. For consistency, we exclude Twitter-specific questions
(added to survey in 2009) and location-based mobile social networks (e.g., Foursquare, added to survey in 2010).
2 Frequent users defined as those that use social networking at least once a week.
SOURCE: McKinsey iConsumer Survey

Exhibit 10
Data generated from the Internet of Things will grow exponentially
as the number of connected nodes increases

Compound annual
growth rate 2010–15, %

Estimated number of connected nodes
Million

72–215

35

5–14

Security

50+

10–30

Health care

8–23

Energy
Industrials
Retail

50+
15
5
30

4–12

Travel and logistics

15

28–83

Utilities

45

15–45

Automotive

20

2–6

17–50
2–5
2–6
2–6
5–14

1–3

1–2

6–18
2010

2015

SOURCE: Analyst interviews; McKinsey Global Institute analysis


TRADITIONAL USES OF IT HAVE CONTRIBUTED TO
PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH— BIG DATA IS THE NEXT FRONTIER
The history of IT investment and innovation and its impact on competitiveness and
productivity strongly suggest that big data can have similar power to transform our
lives. The same preconditions that enabled IT to power productivity are in place for big
data. We believe that there is compelling evidence that the use of big data will become
a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation,
and consumer surplus—as long as the right policies and enablers are in place.
Over a number of years, MGI has researched the link between IT and productivity.24
The same causal relationships apply just as much to big data as they do to IT in
general. Big data levers offer significant potential for improving productivity at the
level of individual companies. Companies including Tesco, Amazon, Wal-Mart,
Harrah’s, Progressive Insurance, and Capital One, and Smart, a wireless player in the
Philippines, have already wielded the use of big data as a competitive weapon—as have
entire economies (see Box 5, “Large companies across the globe have scored early
successes in their use of big data”).

Box 5. Large companies across the globe have scored early
successes in their use of big data
There are notable examples of companies around the globe that are wellknown for their extensive and effective use of data. For instance, Tesco’s loyalty
program generates a tremendous amount of customer data that the company
mines to inform decisions from promotions to strategic segmentation of
customers. Amazon uses customer data to power its recommendation engine
“you may also like …” based on a type of predictive modeling technique called
collaborative filtering. By making supply and demand signals visible between
retail stores and suppliers, Wal-Mart was an early adopter of vendor-managed
inventory to optimize the supply chain. Harrah’s, the US hotels and casinos
group, compiles detailed holistic profiles of its customers and uses them to
tailor marketing in a way that has increased customer loyalty. Progressive
Insurance and Capital One are both known for conducting experiments to
segment their customers systematically and effectively and to tailor product
offers accordingly. Smart, a leading wireless player in the Philippines, analyzes
its penetration, retailer coverage, and average revenue per user at the city or
town level in order to focus on the micro markets with the most potential.

We can disaggregate the impact of IT on productivity first into productivity growth
in IT-producing sectors such as semiconductors, telecoms, and computer
manufacturing, and that of IT-using sectors. In general, much of the productivity
growth in IT-producing sectors results from improving the quality of IT products as
technology develops. In this analysis, we focus largely on the sectors that use IT (and
that will increasingly use big data), accounting for a much larger slice of the global
economy than the sectors that supply IT.
Research shows that there are two essential preconditions for IT to affect labor
productivity. The first is capital deepening—in other words, the IT investments that give

24 See US productivity growth, 1995–2000, McKinsey Global Institute, October 2001, and How IT
enables productivity growth, McKinsey Global Institute, October 2002, both available at www.
mckinsey.com/mgi.

23

24

workers better and faster tools to do their jobs. The second is investment in human
capital and organizational change—i.e., managerial innovations that complement IT
investments in order to drive labor productivity gains. In some cases, a lag between IT
investments and organizational adjustments has meant that productivity improvements
have taken awhile to show up. The same preconditions that explain the impact of IT in
enabling historical productivity growth currently exist for big data.25
There have been four waves of IT adoption with different degrees of impact on
productivity growth in the United States (Exhibit 11). The first of these eras—the
“mainframe” era—ran from 1959 to 1973. During this period, annual US productivity
growth overall was very high at 2.82 percent. IT’s contribution to productivity was
rather modest; at that stage, IT’s share of overall capital expenditure was relatively
low. The second era from 1973 to 1995, which we’ll call the era of “minicomputers and
PCs,” experienced much lower growth in overall productivity, but we can attribute
a greater share of that growth to the impact of IT. Significant IT capital deepening
occurred. Companies began to boost their spending on more distributed types of
computers, and these computers became more powerful as their quality increased.
The third era ran from 1995 to 2000—the era of the “Internet and Web 1.0.” In this
period, US productivity growth returned to high rates, underpinned by significant IT
capital deepening, an intensification of improvements in quality, and also the diffusion
of significant managerial innovations that took advantage of previous IT capital
investment. As we have suggested, there as a lag between IT investment and the
managerial innovation necessary to accelerate productivity growth. Indeed, although
we have named this era for the investments in Internet and Web 1.0 made at this time,
most of the positive impact on productivity in IT-using sectors came from managerial
and organizational change in response to investments in previous eras in mainframe,
minicomputers, and PCs—and not from investment in the Internet.
MGI research found that in this third era, productivity gains were unevenly distributed
at the macroeconomic, sector, and firm levels. In some cases, a leading firm that had
invested in sufficient IT was able to deploy managerial innovation to drive productivity
and outcompete its industry counterparts. Wal-Mart’s implementation of IT-intensive
business processes allowed the company to outperform competitors in the retail
industry. Eventually those competitors invested in IT in response, accelerated their
own productivity growth, and boosted the productivity of the entire sector.
In fact, MGI found that six sectors accounted for almost all of the productivity gains in
the US economy, while the rest contributed either very little productivity growth or even,
in some cases, negative productivity growth. The six sectors that achieved a leap in
productivity shared three broad characteristics in their approach to IT. First, they tailored
their IT investment to sector-specific business processes and linked it to key performance
levers. Second, they deployed IT sequentially, building capabilities over time. Third, IT
investment evolved simultaneously with managerial and technical innovation.

25 We draw both on previous MGI research and an analysis by Dale Jorgenson, Mun Ho, and
Kevin Stiroh of how IT impacted on US productivity growth between 1959 and 2006. See
US productivity growth, 1995–2000, October 2001, and How IT enables productivity growth,
October 2002, both available at www.mckinsey.com/mgi; Dale Jorgenson, Mun Ho, and
Kevin Stiroh, “A Retrospective Look at the US Productivity Growth Resurgence,” Journal
of Economic Perspectives, 2008; and Erik Brynjolfsson and Adam Saunders, Wired for
innovation: How information technology is reshaping the economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2009).


25

Exhibit 11
IT has made a substantial contribution to labor
productivity growth
Annual labor productivity growth
%
2.82

Other contribution
IT contribution1

2.70

2.50

1.11
2.52

1.54

1.49

0.84
0.30
1959–73
Eras of IT
adoption2

1.59

0.65
1973–95

1995–2000

0.96
2000–06

Mainframes
Mini-computers and PCs
Internet and Web 1.0
Mobile devices
and Web 2.0

1 Includes the productivity of IT-producing sectors.
2 Note that there is generally a time lag between the adoption of a type of IT and realizing the resulting productivity impact.
SOURCE: Jorgenson, Mun Ho, and Stiroh, “A Retrospective Look at the US Productivity Growth Resurgence,” Journal of
Economic Perspectives, 2008; Brynjolfsson and Saunders, Wired for Innovation: How Information Technology is
Changing the Economy, MIT Press, 2009

The fourth and final era, running from 2000 to 2006, is the period of the “mobile
devices and Web 2.0.” During this period, the contribution from IT capital deepening
and that from IT-producing sectors dropped. However, the contribution from
managerial innovations increased—again, this wave of organizational change looks
like a lagged response to the investments in Internet and Web 1.0 from the preceding
five years.26
What do these patterns tell us about prospects for big data and productivity? Like
previous waves of IT-enabled productivity, leveraging big data fundamentally requires
both IT investments (in storage and processing power) and managerial innovation.
It seems likely that data intensity and capital deepening will fuel the diffusion of the
complementary managerial innovation boost productivity growth. As of now, there
is no empirical evidence of a link between data intensity or capital deepening in data
investments and productivity in specific sectors. The story of IT and productivity suggests
that the reason for this is a time lag and that we will, at some point, see investments in bigdata-related capital deepening pay off in the form of productivity gains.
In the research we conducted into big data in five domains across different
geographies, we find strong evidence that big data levers can boost efficiency by
reducing the number or size of inputs while retaining the same output level. At the
same time, they can be an important means of adding value by producing more real
output with no increase in input. In health care, for example, big data levers can boost
efficiency by reducing systemwide costs linked to undertreatment and overtreatment
and by reducing errors and duplication in treatment. These levers will also improve
the quality of care and patient outcomes. Similarly, in public sector administration,
big data levers lead to not only efficiency gains, but also gains in effectiveness from
enabling governments to collect taxes more efficiently and helping to drive the quality
of services from education to unemployment offices. For retailers, big data supply
26 We use multifactor productivity in IT-using industries as our measurement of the impact of
managerial innovation.

26

chain and operations levers can improve the efficiency of the entire sector. Marketing
and merchandising levers will help consumers find better products to meet their
needs at more reasonable prices, increasing real value added.
The combination of deepening investments in big data and managerial innovation
to create competitive advantage and boost productivity is very similar to the way IT
developed from the 1970s onward. The experience of IT strongly suggests that we could
be on the cusp of a new wave of productivity growth enabled by the use of big data.
  
Data have become an important factor of production today—on a par with physical
assets and human capital—and the increasing intensity with which enterprises
are gathering information alongside the rise of multimedia, social media, and the
Internet of Things will continue to fuel exponential growth in data for the foreseeable
future. Big data have significant potential to create value for both businesses and
consumers.


2. Big data techniques and
technologies

A wide variety of techniques and technologies has been developed and adapted
to aggregate, manipulate, analyze, and visualize big data. These techniques and
technologies draw from several fields including statistics, computer science, applied
mathematics, and economics. This means that an organization that intends to
derive value from big data has to adopt a flexible, multidisciplinary approach. Some
techniques and technologies were developed in a world with access to far smaller
volumes and variety in data, but have been successfully adapted so that they are
applicable to very large sets of more diverse data. Others have been developed
more recently, specifically to capture value from big data. Some were developed by
academics and others by companies, especially those with online business models
predicated on analyzing big data.
This report concentrates on documenting the potential value that leveraging big
data can create. It is not a detailed instruction manual on how to capture value,
a task that requires highly specific customization to an organization’s context,
strategy, and capabilities. However, we wanted to note some of the main techniques
and technologies that can be applied to harness big data to clarify the way some
of the levers for the use of big data that we describe might work. These are not
comprehensive lists—the story of big data is still being written; new methods and
tools continue to be developed to solve new problems. To help interested readers
find a particular technique or technology easily, we have arranged these lists
alphabetically. Where we have used bold typefaces, we are illustrating the multiple
interconnections between techniques and technologies. We also provide a brief
selection of illustrative examples of visualization, a key tool for understanding very
large-scale data and complex analyses in order to make better decisions.

TECHNIQUES FOR ANALYZING BIG DATA
There are many techniques that draw on disciplines such as statistics and computer
science (particularly machine learning) that can be used to analyze datasets. In this
section, we provide a list of some categories of techniques applicable across a range of
industries. This list is by no means exhaustive. Indeed, researchers continue to develop
new techniques and improve on existing ones, particularly in response to the need
to analyze new combinations of data. We note that not all of these techniques strictly
require the use of big data—some of them can be applied effectively to smaller datasets
(e.g., A/B testing, regression analysis). However, all of the techniques we list here can
be applied to big data and, in general, larger and more diverse datasets can be used to
generate more numerous and insightful results than smaller, less diverse ones.
A/B testing. A technique in which a control group is compared with a variety of test
groups in order to determine what treatments (i.e., changes) will improve a given objective
variable, e.g., marketing response rate. This technique is also known as split testing or
bucket testing. An example application is determining what copy text, layouts, images,
or colors will improve conversion rates on an e-commerce Web site. Big data enables
huge numbers of tests to be executed and analyzed, ensuring that groups are of sufficient
size to detect meaningful (i.e., statistically significant) differences between the control

27

28

and treatment groups (see statistics). When more than one variable is simultaneously
manipulated in the treatment, the multivariate generalization of this technique, which
applies statistical modeling, is often called “A/B/N” testing.
Association rule learning. A set of techniques for discovering interesting
relationships, i.e., “association rules,” among variables in large databases.27 These
techniques consist of a variety of algorithms to generate and test possible rules.
One application is market basket analysis, in which a retailer can determine which
products are frequently bought together and use this information for marketing (a
commonly cited example is the discovery that many supermarket shoppers who buy
diapers also tend to buy beer). Used for data mining.
Classification. A set of techniques to identify the categories in which new data
points belong, based on a training set containing data points that have already
been categorized. One application is the prediction of segment-specific customer
behavior (e.g., buying decisions, churn rate, consumption rate) where there is a
clear hypothesis or objective outcome. These techniques are often described as
supervised learning because of the existence of a training set; they stand in contrast
to cluster analysis, a type of unsupervised learning. Used for data mining.
Cluster analysis. A statistical method for classifying objects that splits a diverse
group into smaller groups of similar objects, whose characteristics of similarity are
not known in advance. An example of cluster analysis is segmenting consumers into
self-similar groups for targeted marketing. This is a type of unsupervised learning
because training data are not used. This technique is in contrast to classification, a
type of supervised learning. Used for data mining.
Crowdsourcing. A technique for collecting data submitted by a large group
of people or ommunity (i.e., the “crowd”) through an open call, usually through
networked media such as the Web.28 This is a type of mass collaboration and an
instance of using Web 2.0.29
Data fusion and data integration. A set of techniques that integrate and analyze data
from multiple sources in order to develop insights in ways that are more efficient and
potentially more accurate than if they were developed by analyzing a single source of
data. Signal processing techniques can be used to implement some types of data
fusion. One example of an application is sensor data from the Internet of Things being
combined to develop an integrated perspective on the performance of a complex
distributed system such as an oil refinery. Data from social media, analyzed by natural
language processing, can be combined with real-time sales data, in order to determine
what effect a marketing campaign is having on customer sentiment and purchasing
behavior.
Data mining. A set of techniques to extract patterns from large datasets by
combining methods from statistics and machine learning with database
management. These techniques include association rule learning, cluster
analysis, classification, and regression. Applications include mining customer
data to determine segments most likely to respond to an offer, mining human
27 R. Agrawal, T. Imielinski, and A. Swami, “Mining association rules between sets of items in
large databases,” SIGMOD Conference 1993: 207–16; P. Hajek, I. Havel, and M. Chytil, “The
GUHA method of automatic hypotheses determination,” Computing 1(4), 1966; 293–308.
28 Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired, Issue 14.06, June 2006.
29 Michael Chui, Andy Miller, and Roger Roberts, “Six ways to make Web 2.0 work,” McKinsey
Quarterly, February 2009.


resources data to identify characteristics of most successful employees, or market
basket analysis to model the purchase behavior of customers.
Ensemble learning. Using multiple predictive models (each developed using
statistics and/or machine learning) to obtain better predictive performance than could
be obtained from any of the constituent models. This is a type of supervised learning.
Genetic algorithms. A technique used for optimization that is inspired by the
process of natural evolution or “survival of the fittest.” In this technique, potential
solutions are encoded as “chromosomes” that can combine and mutate. These
individual chromosomes are selected for survival within a modeled “environment”
that determines the fitness or performance of each individual in the population. Often
described as a type of “evolutionary algorithm,” these algorithms are well-suited for
solving nonlinear problems. Examples of applications include improving job scheduling
in manufacturing and optimizing the performance of an investment portfolio.
Machine learning. A subspecialty of computer science (within a field historically
called “artificial intelligence”) concerned with the design and development of
algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data. A
major focus of machine learning research is to automatically learn to recognize
complex patterns and make intelligent decisions based on data. Natural language
processing is an example of machine learning.
Natural language processing (NLP). A set of techniques from a subspecialty
of computer science (within a field historically called “artificial intelligence”) and
linguistics that uses computer algorithms to analyze human (natural) language.
Many NLP techniques are types of machine learning. One application of NLP is using
sentiment analysis on social media to determine how prospective customers are
reacting to a branding campaign.
Neural networks. Computational models, inspired by the structure and workings
of biological neural networks (i.e., the cells and connections within a brain), that
find patterns in data. Neural networks are well-suited for finding nonlinear patterns.
They can be used for pattern recognition and optimization. Some neural network
applications involve supervised learning and others involve unsupervised learning.
Examples of applications include identifying high-value customers that are at risk of
leaving a particular company and identifying fraudulent insurance claims.
Network analysis. A set of techniques used to characterize relationships among
discrete nodes in a graph or a network. In social network analysis, connections
between individuals in a community or organization are analyzed, e.g., how
information travels, or who has the most influence over whom. Examples of
applications include identifying key opinion leaders to target for marketing, and
identifying bottlenecks in enterprise information flows.
Optimization. A portfolio of numerical techniques used to redesign complex
systems and processes to improve their performance according to one or more
objective measures (e.g., cost, speed, or reliability). Examples of applications include
improving operational processes such as scheduling, routing, and floor layout,
and making strategic decisions such as product range strategy, linked investment
analysis, and RD portfolio strategy. Genetic algorithms are an example of an
optimization technique.

29

30

Pattern recognition. A set of machine learning techniques that assign some sort
of output value (or label) to a given input value (or instance) according to a specific
algorithm. Classification techniques are an example.
Predictive modeling. A set of techniques in which a mathematical model is created
or chosen to best predict the probability of an outcome. An example of an application
in customer relationship management is the use of predictive models to estimate the
likelihood that a customer will “churn” (i.e., change providers) or the likelihood that
a customer can be cross-sold another product. Regression is one example of the
many predictive modeling techniques.
Regression. A set of statistical techniques to determine how the value of the
dependent variable changes when one or more independent variables is modified.
Often used for forecasting or prediction. Examples of applications include forecasting
sales volumes based on various market and economic variables or determining what
measurable manufacturing parameters most influence customer satisfaction. Used
for data mining.
Sentiment analysis. Application of natural language processing and other analytic
techniques to identify and extract subjective information from source text material.
Key aspects of these analyses include identifying the feature, aspect, or product
about which a sentiment is being expressed, and determining the type, “polarity” (i.e.,
positive, negative, or neutral) and the degree and strength of the sentiment. Examples
of applications include companies applying sentiment analysis to analyze social media
(e.g., blogs, microblogs, and social networks) to determine how different customer
segments and stakeholders are reacting to their products and actions.
Signal processing. A set of techniques from electrical engineering and applied
mathematics originally developed to analyze discrete and continuous signals, i.e.,
representations of analog physical quantities (even if represented digitally) such as
radio signals, sounds, and images. This category includes techniques from signal
detection theory, which quantifies the ability to discern between signal and noise.
Sample applications include modeling for time series analysis or implementing
data fusion to determine a more precise reading by combining data from a set of less
precise data sources (i.e., extracting the signal from the noise).
Spatial analysis. A set of techniques, some applied from statistics, which analyze
the topological, geometric, or geographic properties encoded in a data set. Often
the data for spatial analysis come from geographic information systems (GIS) that
capture data including location information, e.g., addresses or latitude/longitude
coordinates. Examples of applications include the incorporation of spatial data
into spatial regressions (e.g., how is consumer willingness to purchase a product
correlated with location?) or simulations (e.g., how would a manufacturing supply
chain network perform with sites in different locations?).
Statistics. The science of the collection, organization, and interpretation of data,
including the design of surveys and experiments. Statistical techniques are often
used to make judgments about what relationships between variables could have
occurred by chance (the “null hypothesis”), and what relationships between variables
likely result from some kind of underlying causal relationship (i.e., that are “statistically
significant”). Statistical techniques are also used to reduce the likelihood of Type
I errors (“false positives”) and Type II errors (“false negatives”). An example of an
application is A/B testing to determine what types of marketing material will most
increase revenue.


Supervised learning. The set of machine learning techniques that infer a function or
relationship from a set of training data. Examples include classification and support
vector machines.30 This is different from unsupervised learning.
Simulation. Modeling the behavior of complex systems, often used for forecasting,
predicting and scenario planning. Monte Carlo simulations, for example, are a class
of algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling, i.e., running thousands of
simulations, each based on different assumptions. The result is a histogram that gives
a probability distribution of outcomes. One application is assessing the likelihood of
meeting financial targets given uncertainties about the success of various initiatives.
Time series analysis. Set of techniques from both statistics and signal processing
for analyzing sequences of data points, representing values at successive times, to
extract meaningful characteristics from the data. Examples of time series analysis
include the hourly value of a stock market index or the number of patients diagnosed
with a given condition every day. Time series forecasting is the use of a model to
predict future values of a time series based on known past values of the same or other
series. Some of these techniques, e.g., structural modeling, decompose a series into
trend, seasonal, and residual components, which can be useful for identifying cyclical
patterns in the data. Examples of applications include forecasting sales figures, or
predicting the number of people who will be diagnosed with an infectious disease.
Unsupervised learning. A set of machine learning techniques that finds hidden
structure in unlabeled data. Cluster analysis is an example of unsupervised learning
(in contrast to supervised learning).
Visualization. Techniques used for creating images, diagrams, or animations to
communicate, understand, and improve the results of big data analyses (see the last
section of this chapter).

BIG DATA TECHNOLOGIES
There is a growing number of technologies used to aggregate, manipulate, manage,
and analyze big data. We have detailed some of the more prominent technologies but
this list is not exhaustive, especially as more technologies continue to be developed
to support big data techniques, some of which we have listed.
Big Table. Proprietary distributed database system built on the Google File System.
Inspiration for HBase.
Business intelligence (BI). A type of application software designed to report,
analyze, and present data. BI tools are often used to read data that have been
previously stored in a data warehouse or data mart. BI tools can also be used
to create standard reports that are generated on a periodic basis, or to display
information on real-time management dashboards, i.e., integrated displays of metrics
that measure the performance of a system.
Cassandra. An open source (free) database management system designed to handle
huge amounts of data on a distributed system. This system was originally developed
at Facebook and is now managed as a project of the Apache Software foundation.

30 Corinna Cortes and Vladimir Vapnik, “Support-vector networks,” Machine Learning 20(3),
September 1995 (www.springerlink.com/content/k238jx04hm87j80g/).

31

32

Cloud computing. A computing paradigm in which highly scalable computing
resources, often configured as a distributed system, are provided as a service
through a network.
Data mart. Subset of a data warehouse, used to provide data to users usually
through business intelligence tools.
Data warehouse. Specialized database optimized for reporting, often used for
storing large amounts of structured data. Data is uploaded using ETL (extract,
transform, and load) tools from operational data stores, and reports are often
generated using business intelligence tools.
Distributed system. Multiple computers, communicating through a network, used to
solve a common computational problem. The problem is divided into multiple tasks,
each of which is solved by one or more computers working in parallel. Benefits of
distributed systems include higher performance at a lower cost (i.e., because a cluster
of lower-end computers can be less expensive than a single higher-end computer),
higher reliability (i.e., because of a lack of a single point of failure), and more scalability
(i.e., because increasing the power of a distributed system can be accomplished by
simply adding more nodes rather than completely replacing a central computer).
Dynamo. Proprietary distributed data storage system developed by Amazon.
Extract, transform, and load (ETL). Software tools used to extract data from
outside sources, transform them to fit operational needs, and load them into a
database or data warehouse.
Google File System. Proprietary distributed file system developed by Google; part
of the inspiration for Hadoop.31
Hadoop. An open source (free) software framework for processing huge datasets
on certain kinds of problems on a distributed system. Its development was inspired
by Google’s MapReduce and Google File System. It was originally developed at
Yahoo! and is now managed as a project of the Apache Software Foundation.
HBase. An open source (free), distributed, non-relational database modeled on
Google’s Big Table. It was originally developed by Powerset and is now managed as
a project of the Apache Software foundation as part of the Hadoop.
MapReduce. A software framework introduced by Google for processing huge
datasets on certain kinds of problems on a distributed system.32 Also implemented in
Hadoop.
Mashup. An application that uses and combines data presentation or functionality
from two or more sources to create new services. These applications are often made
available on the Web, and frequently use data accessed through open application
programming interfaces or from open data sources.
Metadata. Data that describes the content and context of data files, e.g., means of
creation, purpose, time and date of creation, and author.
31 Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung, “The Google file system,” 19th ACM
Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Lake George, NY, October 2003 (labs.google.
com/papers/gfs.html).
32 Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, “MapReduce: Simplified data processing on large
clusters,” Sixth Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation, San Francisco,
CA, December 2004 (labs.google.com/papers/mapreduce.html).


Non-relational database. A database that does not store data in tables (rows and
columns). (In contrast to relational database).
R. An open source (free) programming language and software environment for
statistical computing and graphics. The R language has become a de facto standard
among statisticians for developing statistical software and is widely used for
statistical software development and data analysis. R is part of the GNU Project, a
collaboration that supports open source projects.
Relational database. A database made up of a collection of tables (relations), i.e.,
data are stored in rows and columns. Relational database management systems
(RDBMS) store a type of structured data. SQL is the most widely used language for
managing relational databases (see item below).
Semi-structured data. Data that do not conform to fixed fields but contain tags and
other markers to separate data elements. Examples of semi-structured data include
XML or HTML-tagged text. Contrast with structured data and unstructured data.
SQL. Originally an acronym for structured query language, SQL is a computer
language designed for managing data in relational databases. This technique
includes the ability to insert, query, update, and delete data, as well as manage data
schema (database structures) and control access to data in the database.
Stream processing. Technologies designed to process large real-time streams of event
data. Stream processing enables applications such as algorithmic trading in financial
services, RFID event processing applications, fraud detection, process monitoring, and
location-based services in telecommunications. Also known as event stream processing.
Structured data. Data that reside in fixed fields. Examples of structured data include
relational databases or data in spreadsheets. Contrast with semi-structured data
and unstructured data.
Unstructured data. Data that do not reside in fixed fields. Examples include freeform text (e.g., books, articles, body of e-mail messages), untagged audio, image and
video data. Contrast with structured data and semi-structured data.
Visualization. Technologies used for creating images, diagrams, or animations to
communicate a message that are often used to synthesize the results of big data
analyses (see the next section for examples).

VISUALIZATION
Presenting information in such a way that people can consume it effectively is a key
challenge that needs to be met if analyzing data is to lead to concrete action. As
we discussed in box 4, human beings have evolved to become highly effective at
perceiving certain types of patterns with their senses but continue to face significant
constraints in their ability to process other types of data such as large amounts of
numerical or text data. For this reason, there is a currently a tremendous amount of
research and innovation in the field of visualization, i.e., techniques and technologies
used for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate, understand, and
improve the results of big data analyses. We present some examples to provide a
glimpse into this burgeoning and important field that supports big data.

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Tag cloud
This graphic is a visualization of the text of this report in the form of a tag cloud, i.e., a
weighted visual list, in which words that appear most frequently are larger and words
that appear less frequently smaller. This type of visualization helps the reader to
quickly perceive the most salient concepts in a large body of text.

Clustergram
A clustergram is a visualization technique used for cluster analysis displaying how
individual members of a dataset are assigned to clusters as the number of clusters
increases.33 The choice of the number of clusters is an important parameter in cluster
analysis. This technique enables the analyst to reach a better understanding of how
the results of clustering vary with different numbers of clusters.

33 Matthias Schonlau, “The clustergram: a graph for visualizing hierarchical and non-hierarchical
cluster analyses,” The Stata Journal, 2002; 2 (4): 391-402.


History f low
History flow is a visualization technique that charts the evolution of a document as it is
edited by multiple contributing authors.34 Time appears on the horizontal axis, while
contributions to to the text are on the vertical axis; each author has a different color
code and the vertical length of a bar indicates the amount of text written by each author.
By visualizing the history of a document in this manner, various insights easily emerge.
For instance, the history flow we show here that depicts the Wikipedia entry for the
word “Islam” shows that an increasing number of authors have made contributions
over the history of this entry.35 One can also see easily that the length of the document
has grown over time as more authors have elaborated on the topic, but that, at certain
points, there have been significant deletions, too, i.e., when the vertical length has
decreased. One can even see instances of “vandalism” in which the document has
been removed completely although, interestingly, the document has tended to be
repaired and returned to its previous state very quickly.

34 Fernanda B. Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Kushal Dave, Studying cooperation and conflict
between authors with history flow visualizations, CHI2004 proceedings of the SIGCHI
conference on human factors in computing systems, 2004.
35 For more examples of history flows, see the gallery provided by the Collaborative User
Experience Research group of IBM (www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/
gallery.htm).

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36

Spatial information f low
Another visualization technique is one that depicts spatial information flows. The
example we show here is entitled the New York Talk Exchange.36 It shows the amount
of Internet Protocol (IP) data flowing between New York and cities around the world.
The size of the glow on a particular city location corresponds to the amount of IP
traffic flowing between that place and New York City; the greater the glow, the larger
the flow. This visualization allows us to determine quickly which cities are most closely
connected to New York in terms of their communications volume.

36 The New York Talk Exchange was displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2008
(senseable.mit.edu/nyte/).


3. The transformative potential of big
data in five domains

To explore how big data can create value and the size of this potential, we
chose five domains to study in depth: health care in the United States; public
sector administration in the European Union; retail in the United States; global
manufacturing; and global personal location data.
Together these five represented close to 40 percent of global GDP in 2010
(Exhibit 12).37 In the course of our analysis of these domains, we conducted interviews
with industry experts and undertook a thorough review of current literature. For
each domain, we identified specific levers through which big data can create value;
quantified the potential for additional value; and cataloged the enablers necessary for
companies, organizations, governments, and individuals to capture that value.
The five domains vary in their sophistication and maturity in the use of big data and
therefore offer different business lessons. They also represent a broad spectrum of
key segments of the global economy and capture a range of regional perspectives.
They include globally tradable sectors such as manufacturing and nontradable
sectors such as public sector administration, as well as a mix of products and
services.
Health care is a large and important segment of the US economy that faces
tremendous productivity challenges. It has multiple and varied stakeholders,
including the pharmaceutical and medical products industries, providers, payors,
and patients. Each of these has different interests and business incentives while
still being closely intertwined. Each generates pools of data, but they have typically
remained unconnected from each other. A significant portion of clinical data is not
yet digitized. There is a substantial opportunity to create value if these pools of data
can be digitized, combined, and used effectively. However, the incentives to leverage
big data in this sector are often out of alignment, offering an instructive case on the
sector-wide interventions that can be necessary to capture value.
The public sector is another large part of the global economy facing tremendous
pressure to improve its productivity. Governments have access to large pools of
digital data but, in general, have hardly begun to take advantage of the powerful ways
in which they could use this information to improve performance and transparency.
We chose to study the administrative parts of government. This is a domain where
there is a great deal of data, which gives us the opportunity to draw analogies with
processes in other knowledge worker industries such as claims processing in
insurance.
In contrast to the first two domains, retail is a sector in which some players have
been using big data for some time for segmenting customers and managing supply
chains. Nevertheless, there is still tremendous upside potential across the industry
for individual players to expand and improve their use of big data, particularly given
the increasing ease with which they can collect information on their consumers,
suppliers, and inventories.
37 For more details on the methodology that we used in our case studies, see the appendix.

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38

Manufacturing offers a detailed look at a globally traded industry with often complex
and widely distributed value chains and a large amount of data available. This domain
therefore offers an examination at multiple points in the value chain, from bringing
products to market and research and development (RD) to after-sales services.
Personal location data is a nascent domain that cuts across industry sectors
from telecom to media to transportation. The data generated are growing quickly,
reflecting the burgeoning adoption of smartphones and other applications. This
domain is a hotbed of innovation that could transform organizations and the lives of
individuals, potentially creating a significant amount of surplus for consumers.
Exhibit 12
The five sectors or domains we have chosen to study in depth make
important contributions to the global economy
Estimated global GDP of sectors in 2010
% of total GDP
Healthcare1
Public sector2
Retail
Manufacturing
Telecommunications3
Total

Nominal $ trillion

7

3.9
6

3.7
6

3.3
10.1

18
2

1.2
39

22.3

Total global GDP 2010 =
$57.5 trillion
1 Includes health and social services, medical and measuring equipment, and pharmaceuticals.
2 Refers to public sector administration, defense, and compulsory social security (excludes education).
3 Since personal location data is a domain and not a sector, we’ve used telecom as a comparison for GDP.
SOURCE: Global Insight; McKinsey Global Institute analysis


3a. Health care (United States)
Reforming the US health care system to reduce the rate at which costs have been
increasing while sustaining its current strengths is critical to the United States
both as a society and as an economy. Health care, one of the largest sectors of the
US economy, accounts for slightly more than 17 percent of GDP and employs an
estimated 11 percent of the country’s workers. It is becoming clear that the historic
rate of growth of US health care expenditures, increasing annually by nearly 5 percent
in real terms over the last decade, is unsustainable and is a major contributor to the
high national debt levels projected to develop over the next two decades. An aging
US population and the emergence of new, more expensive treatments will amplify
this trend. Thus far, health care has lagged behind other industries in improving
operational performance and adopting technology-enabled process improvements.
The magnitude of the problem and potentially long timelines for implementing change
make it imperative that decisive measures aimed at increasing productivity begin in
the near term to ease escalating cost pressures.
It is possible to address these challenges by emulating and implementing best
practices in health care, pioneered in the United States and in other countries. Doing
so will often require the analysis of large datasets. MGI studied the health care sector
in the United States, where we took an expansive view to include the provider, payor,
and pharmaceutical and medical products (PMP) subsectors to understand how
big data can help to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of health care as an
entire system. Some of the actions that can help stem the rising costs of US health
care while improving its quality don’t necessarily require big data. These include, for
example, tackling major underlying issues such as the high incidence and costs of
lifestyle and behavior-induced disease, minimizing any economic distortion between
consumers and providers, and reducing the administrative complexity in payors.38
However, the use of large datasets underlies another set of levers that have the
potential to play a major role in more effective and cost-saving care initiatives, the
emergence of better products and services, and the creation of new business models
in health care and its associated industries. But deploying big data in these areas
would need to be accompanied by a range of enablers, some of which would require
a substantial rethinking of the way health care is provided and funded.
Our estimates of the potential value that big data can create in health care are
therefore not predictions of what will happen but our view on the full economic
potential, assuming that required IT and dataset investments, analytical capabilities,
privacy protections, and appropriate economic incentives are put in place. With
this caveat, we estimate that in about ten years, there is an opportunity to capture
more than $300 billion annually in new value, with two-thirds of that in the form of
reductions to national health care expenditure—about 8 percent of estimated health
care spending at 2010 levels.

US HEALTH CARE COSTS ARE OUTPACING ECONOMIC GROWTH
The United States spends more per person on health care than any other nation in the
world—without obvious evidence of better outcomes. Over the next decade, average
annual health spending growth is expected to outpace average annual growth in

38 Paul D. Mango and Vivian E. Riefberg, “Three imperatives for improving US health care,”
McKinsey Quarterly December 2008.

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40

GDP by almost 2 percentage points.39 Available evidence suggests that a substantial
share of US spending on health care contributes little to better health outcomes.
Multiple studies have found that the United States spends about 30 percent more on
care than the average Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
(OECD) country when adjusted for per capita GDP and relative wealth.40 Yet the
United States still falls below OECD averages on such health care parameters as
average life expectancy and infant mortality. The additional spending above OECD
trends totals an estimated $750 billion a year out of a national health budget in 2007
of $2.24 trillion—that’s about $2,500 per person per year (Exhibit 13). Age, disease
burden, and health outcomes cannot account for the significant difference.
Exhibit 13
A comparison with OECD countries suggests that the total economic
potential for efficiency improvements is about $750 billion
Per capita health expenditure and per capita GDP, OECD countries, 2007
$ purchasing power parity (PPP)
Per capita health expenditure
8,000

United States

7,000

~$2,500
per capita

6,000
5,000

Canada Denmark
Belgium
Germany

4,000

New Zealand

3,000

Netherlands

Austria
Sweden
Iceland

Ireland

South Korea
Israel Japan
Australia United Kingdom
Slovenia
Spain
Finland
Estonia
Czech Republic

Slovak Republic

2,000
1,000

France
Greece Italy

Norway

Switzerland

Hungary
Poland
Mexico
Chile

Turkey

0
10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

30,000

35,000

40,000

45,000

50,000

55,000

60,000

Per capita GDP
SOURCE: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

The current reimbursement system does not create incentives for doctors, hospitals,
and other providers of health care—or even their patients—to optimize efficiency or
control costs. As currently constructed, the system generally pays for procedures
without regard to their effectiveness and necessity. Significantly slowing the growth
of health care spending will require fundamental changes in today’s incentives.
Examples of integrated care models in the United States and beyond demonstrate
that, when incentives are aligned and the necessary enablers are in place, the impact
of leveraging big data can be very significant (see Box 6, “Health care systems in the
United States and beyond have shown early success in their use of big data”).

39 Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Health Expenditure Projections
2009–2019, September 2010.
40 These studies adjust for relative health using purchasing power parity. For more detail,
see Accounting for the cost of US health care: A new look at why Americans spend more,
McKinsey Global Institute, December 2008 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi); Chris L. Peterson
and Rachel Burton, US health care spending: Comparison with other OECD countries,
Congressional Research Service, September 2007; Mark Pearson, OECD Health Division,
Written statement to Senate Special Committee on Aging, September 2009.


Box 6. Health care systems in the United States and beyond have
shown early success in their use of big data
The fiscal pressures imposed by rising health care costs have motivated the
creation of a promising range of pilot programs in the United States and beyond
that use big data and its analytical and management levers to capture real
medium- and long-term value. Examples of such innovations include:
ƒƒ The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in the United States has
successfully demonstrated several health care information technology (HIT)
and remote patient monitoring programs. The VA health system generally
outperforms the private sector in following recommended processes for
patient care, adhering to clinical guidelines, and achieving greater rates of
evidence-based drug therapy. These achievements are largely possible
because of the VA’s performance-based accountability framework and
disease-management practices enabled by electronic medical records
(EMR) and HIT.
ƒƒ The California-based integrated managed-care consortium Kaiser
Permanente connected clinical and cost data early on, thus providing the
crucial dataset that led to the discovery of Vioxx’s adverse drug effects and
the subsequent withdrawal of the drug from the market.1
ƒƒ The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, part of the United
Kingdom’s National Health Service, has pioneered the use of large clinical
datasets to investigate the clinical and cost effectiveness of new drugs and
expensive existing treatments. The agency issues appropriate guidelines on
such costs for the National Health Service and often negotiates prices and
market-access conditions with PMP industries.
ƒƒ The Italian Medicines Agency collects and analyzes clinical data on the
experience of expensive new drugs as part of a national cost-effectiveness
program. The agency can impose “conditional reimbursement” status on
new drugs and can then reevaluate prices and market-access conditions in
light of the results of its clinical data studies.
1 Merck was granted FDA approval to market Vioxx (rofecoxib) in May 1999. In the
five years that elapsed before Merck withdrew Vioxx from the market, an estimated
80 million patients took the drug, making it a “blockbuster” with more than $2 billion per
year in sales. Despite statistical evidence in a number of small-scale studies (analyzed
later in a metastudy), it took more than five years until the cardiovascular risks of Vioxx
were proven. In August 2004, a paper at an International Pharmacoepidemiology
meeting in Bordeaux, France, reported the results of a study involving a large Kaiser
Permanente database that compared the risk of adverse cardiovascular events for users
of Vioxx against the risk for users of Pfizer’s Celebrex. The study concluded that more
than 27,000 myocardial infarction (heart attack) and sudden cardiac deaths occurred
between 1999 and 2003 that could have been avoided. Taking 25 milligrams per day
or more of Vioxx resulted in more than three times the risk of acute heart attacks or
sudden cardiac death compared with Celebrex use. On September 30, 2004, in what
many observers called the largest drug recall in the history of medicine, Merck pulled
Vioxx from pharmacy shelves.

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US HEALTH CARE HAS FOUR MAIN POOLS OF DATA
The US health care system has four major pools of data within health care, each primarily
held by a different constituency. Data are highly fragmented in this domain. The four
pools are provider clinical data, payor activity (claims) and cost data, pharmaceutical
and medical products RD data, and patient behavior and sentiment data (Exhibit 14).
The amount of data that is available, collected, and analyzed varies widely within the
sector. For instance, health providers usually have extensively digitized financial and
administrative data, including accounting and basic patient information. In general,
however, providers are still at an early stage in digitizing and aggregating clinical data
covering such areas as the progress and outcomes of treatments. Depending on the
care setting, we estimate that as much as 30 percent of clinical text/numerical data in the
United States, including medical records, bills, and laboratory and surgery reports, is still
not generated electronically. Even when clinical data are in digital form, they are usually
held by an individual provider and rarely shared. Indeed, the majority of clinical data
actually generated are in the form of video and monitor feeds, which are used in real time
and not stored.
Exhibit 14
Four distinct big data pools exist in the US health care domain today
with little overlap in ownership and low integration
Data pools

Pharmaceutical RD data
▪ Owner: Pharmaceutical
companies, academia
▪ Example datasets: clinical
trials, high throughput
screening (HTS) libraries

Clinical data
▪ Owners: providers
▪ Example datasets: electronic
medical records, medical images

Integration of
data pools required for
major opportunities

Activity (claims) and cost data
▪ Owners: payors, providers
▪ Example datasets: utilization
of care, cost estimates

Patient behavior and sentiment data
▪ Owners: various including consumer
and stakeholders outside health care
(e.g., retail, apparel)
▪ Example data sets: patient behaviors
and preferences, retail purchase
history, exercise data captured
in running shoes


There is a strong political push in the United States to deploy electronic health
records (EHR)—sometimes referred to as electronic medical records (EMR)—more
widely in provider settings. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009
included $20 billion in stimulus funding over five years to encourage the meaningful
use of EHR by physicians and hospitals. Outcomes-based reimbursement plans
could also encourage the deployment of EHR because they would require accurate
and complete databases and analytical tools to measure outcomes.
Payors, meanwhile, have been capturing activity (claims) and cost data digitally for
many years. Nevertheless, the information is not generally in a form that payors can
use for the kind of advanced analysis necessary to generate real insights because
it is rarely standardized, often fragmented, or generated in legacy IT systems with
incompatible formats.


The PMP subsector is arguably the most advanced in the digitization and use of data
in the health care sector. PMP captures RD data digitally and already analyzes them
extensively. Additional opportunities could come from combining PMP data with
other datasets such as genomics or proteomics data for personal medicine, or clinical
datasets from providers to identify expanded applications and adverse effects.
In addition to clinical, activity (claims) cost data, and pharmaceutical RD datasets,
there is an emerging pool of data related to patient behavior (e.g., propensity to
change lifestyle behavior) and sentiment (e.g., from social media) that is potentially
valuable but is not held by the health care sector. Patient behavior and sentiment data
could be used to influence adherence to treatment regimes, affect lifestyle factors,
and influence a broad range of wellness activities.
Many of the levers we identify in the next section involve the integration of multiple
data pools. It will be imperative for organizations, and possibly policy makers, to
figure out how to align economic incentives and overcome technology barriers to
enable the sharing of data.

US HEALTH CARE CAN TAP MULTIPLE BIG DATA LEVERS
We have identified a set of 15 levers in five broad categories that have the potential to
improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the health care sector by exploiting the
tremendous amount of electronic information that is, and could become, available
throughout the US health care sector. Where possible, we estimate the financial
potential of deploying these levers in the form of cost savings, increased efficiencies,
improved treatment effectiveness, and productivity enhancement. We have arrived at
these estimates by referring to international and US best practices (see the appendix
for more details). Assuming that the US health care system removes structural
barriers and puts the right incentives in place for different stakeholders, we estimate
that big data can help to unlock more than $300 billion a year in additional value
throughout the sector. The amount that the sector will capture in reality will depend on
the collective actions of health care organizations and policy makers in overcoming
structural and other barriers.
We focus on levers that require the analysis of large datasets that relate primarily
to the development and provision of care, rather than all HIT levers such as
automation in claims processing. Our estimates do not aim to capture the entirety
of the value generated by HIT (e.g., we exclude value that does not fundamentally
require the analysis of large datasets, such as the time saved by doctors and
nurses in transcribing notes through the use of EMR or the efficiency savings and
increased access to care through mobile health). To validate our findings, we have
compared our estimates with those made by other researchers and found them to be
comparable (see the appendix).
We divide the levers into five broad categories: clinical operations, payment/pricing,
RD, new business models, and public health. We now discuss each in turn:
Clinical operations
Within clinical operations are five big data levers that mainly affect the way providers,
payors, and PMP provide clinical care. We estimate that, if fully employed, these five
levers could reduce national health care expenditure by up to $165 billion a year from
a base of $2.5 trillion in 2009.

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44

1. Comparative effectiveness research. Outcomes-based research determines
which treatments will work best for specific patients (“optimal treatment
pathways”) by analyzing comprehensive patient and outcome data to compare
the effectiveness of various interventions. This research includes what is known
as comparative effectiveness research (CER). Many studies have shown that wide
variations exist in health care practices, outcomes, and costs across different
providers, geographies, and patients. Critically analyzing large datasets that
include patient characteristics and the cost and outcomes of treatments can help
to identify the most clinically effective and cost-effective treatments to apply. If
the health care system implements CER, there is potential to reduce incidences
of overtreatment—i.e., interventions that do more harm than good—and
undertreatment—cases in which a specific therapy should have been prescribed
but was not. Both overtreatment and undertreatment result in worse patient
outcomes and higher health care costs in the long run.

Around the world, agencies such as NICE in the United Kingdom, the Institut
für Qualität und Wirtschaftlichkeit im Gesundheitswesen (Institute for Quality
and Efficiency in Health Care, or IQWIG) in Germany, the Common Drug Review
in Canada, and Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme have begun CER
programs with successful results. The United States took a first step in this
direction through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The
law created the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness
Research, which, as its name implies, coordinates comparative effectiveness
research across the federal government and makes recommendations for the
$400 million allocated for CER. If this lever is to achieve systemwide scale in the
United States, it needs to overcome some significant barriers. Comprehensive
and consistent clinical and claims datasets need to be captured, integrated,
and made available to researchers, and a number of potential issues need to
be negotiated. For example, in the current rush to deploy EHR, a potential lack
of standards and interoperability could make it difficult to combine datasets.
Another concern is how to ensure patient privacy while still providing sufficiently
detailed data to allow effective analyses. Having identified optimal treatment
pathways, payors will need to be allowed to tie reimbursement decisions and
the design of benefits to the results of this research. However, current US law
prohibits the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services from using the cost/
benefit ratio for reimbursement decisions. Disseminating knowledge about the
most effective treatments to medical professionals will require the introduction or
upgrade of tools, including clinical decision support systems (see the next lever),
so that physicians can receive recommendations of best practices at the point of
actual decision making about treatments.

2. Clinical decision support systems. The second lever is deploying clinical decision
support systems for enhancing the efficiency and quality of operations. These
systems include computerized physician order-entry capabilities. The current
generation of such systems analyzes physician entries and compares them against
medical guidelines to alert for potential errors such as adverse drug reactions or
events. By deploying these systems, providers can reduce adverse reactions and
lower treatment error rates and liability claims, especially those arising from clinical
mistakes. In one particularly powerful study conducted at a pediatric critical care
unit in a major US metropolitan area, a clinical decision support system tool cut
adverse drug reactions and events by 40 percent in just two months.41
41 Amy L. Potts, Frederick E. Barr, David F. Gregory, Lorianne Wright, and Neal R. Patel,
“Computerized physician order entry and medication errors in a pediatric critical care unit,”
Pediatrics 113(1), 2004: 59–63.


In the future, big data systems such as these can become substantially more
intelligent by including modules that use image analysis and recognition in
databases of medical images (X-ray, CT, MRI) for prediagnosis or that automatically
mine medical literature to create a medical expertise database capable of
suggesting treatment options to physicians based on patients’ medical records. In
addition, clinical decision support systems can enable a larger portion of work to
flow to nurse practitioners and physician assistants by automating and facilitating
the physician advisory role and thereby improving the efficiency of patient care.

3. Transparency about medical data. The third clinical big data lever is analyzing
data on medical procedures and creating transparency around those data both
to identify performance opportunities for medical professionals, processes, and
institutions and to help patients shop for the care that offers the best value.

Operational and performance datasets from provider settings can be analyzed to
create process maps and dashboards enabling information transparency. The goal
is to identify and analyze sources of variability and waste in clinical processes and
then optimize processes. Mapping processes and physical flows as well as patient
journeys within an organization can help to reduce delays in the system. Simply
publishing cost, quality, and performance data, even without a tangible financial
reward, often creates the competition that drives improvements in performance. The
operational streamlining resulting from these analyses can produce reduced costs
through lean processes, additional revenue potential from freed-up capacity, more
efficient staffing that matches demand, improved quality of care, and better patient
experiences. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is testing dashboards
as part of an initiative to implement open government principles of transparency,
public participation, and collaboration. In the same spirit, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention has begun publishing health data in an interactive format and
providing advanced features for manipulating its pretabulated data.

Publishing quality and performance data can also help patients make more
informed health care decisions compared with the situation today in which
differences in cost and quality are largely opaque to them.42 Transparency about
the data on cost and quality, along with appropriate reimbursement schemes
(e.g., where patients’ out-of-pocket expenses are tied to the actual costs
charged by the providers) will encourage patients to take a more value-conscious
approach to consuming health care, which in turn will help make providers more
competitive and ultimately improve the overall performance of the sector.

4. Remote patient monitoring. The fourth clinical big data lever is collecting data
from remote patient monitoring for chronically ill patients and analyzing the
resulting data to monitor adherence (determining if patients are actually doing
what was prescribed) and to improve future drug and treatment options. An
estimated 150 million patients in the United States in 2010 were chronically ill with
diseases such as diabetes, congestive heart failure, and hypertension, and they
accounted for more than 80 percent of health system costs that year. Remote
patient monitoring systems can be highly useful for treating such patients. The
systems include devices that monitor heart conditions, send information about
blood-sugar levels, transmit feedback from caregivers, and even include “chipon-a-pill” technology—pharmaceuticals that act as instruments to report when
they are ingested by a patient—that feeds data in near real time to electronic
42 Cost differences can be quite substantial. For example, the cost of a colonoscopy can vary by
a factor of six within the San Francisco area.

45

46

medical record databases. Simply alerting a physician that a congestive
heart failure patient is gaining weight because of water retention can prevent
an emergency hospitalization. More generally, the use of data from remote
monitoring systems can reduce patient in-hospital bed days, cut emergency
department visits, improve the targeting of nursing home care and outpatient
physician appointments, and reduce long-term health complications.
5. Advanced analytics applied to patient profiles. A fifth clinical operations big
data lever is applying advanced analytics to patient profiles (e.g., segmentation and
predictive modeling) to identify individuals who would benefit from proactive care or
lifestyle changes. For instance, these approaches can help identify patients who are
at high risk of developing a specific disease (e.g., diabetes) and would benefit from
a preventive care program. These approaches can also enable the better selection
of patients with a preexisting condition for inclusion in a disease-management
program that best matches their needs. And, of course, patient data can provide an
enhanced ability to measure the success of these programs, an exercise that poses
a major challenge for many current preventive care programs.
Payment/pricing
The two levers in this category mainly involve improving health care payment and
pricing, and they focus primarily on payors’ operations. Together, they have the
potential to create $50 billion in value, half of which would result in cost savings to
national health care expenditure.
1. Automated systems. The first lever is implementing automated systems (e.g.,
machine learning techniques such as neural networks) for fraud detection and
checking the accuracy and consistency of payors’ claims. The US payor industry
estimates that 2 to 4 percent of annual claims are fraudulent or unjustified; official
estimates for Medicare and Medicaid range up to a 10 percent share. Savings
can be achieved through a comprehensive and consistent claims database (e.g.,
the proposed all-payors claims database) and trained algorithms to process and
check claims for accuracy and to detect cases with a high likelihood of fraud,
defects, or inaccuracy either retroactively or in real time. When used in near real
time, these automated systems can identify overpayments before payouts are
made, recouping significant costs.
2. Health Economics and Outcomes Research and performance-based
pricing plans. The second lever is utilizing Health Economics and Outcomes
Research and performance-based pricing plans based on real-world patient
outcomes data to arrive at fair economic compensation, from drug prices paid to
pharmaceutical companies to reimbursements paid to providers by payors.

In the case of drug pricing, pharmaceutical companies would share part of the
therapeutic risk. For payors, a key benefit is that cost- and risk-sharing schemes
for new drugs enable controls or a cap on a significant part of health care
spending. At the same time, PMP companies could gain better market access
in the presence of strong efforts to contain health care costs. PMP companies
can also secure potentially higher revenue from more efficient drug use through
innovative pricing schemes. Patients would obtain improved health outcomes
with a value-based formulary and gain access to innovative drugs at reasonable
costs. To achieve maximum value for the health care system, the United States
would need to allow collective bargaining by payors.


Several pharmaceutical pricing pilot programs based on Health Economics and
Outcomes Research are in place, primarily in Europe. Novartis, for example, agreed
with German health insurers to cover costs in excess of €315 million ($468 million)
per year for Lucentis, its drug for treating age-related macular degeneration.

Some payors are also measuring the costs and quality of providers and
negotiating reimbursements based on the data. For example, payors may exclude
providers whose costs to treat different diseases are out of line after adjusting
for comorbidities (the presence of one or more diseases in addition to a primary
disease). Alternatively, they may negotiate innovative pricing plans, such as
outcome-based payments, if providers achieve specific quality and outcomes
benchmarks.

RD
Five big data levers could improve RD productivity in the PMP subsector. Together,
these levers could create more than $100 billion in value, about $25 billion of which
could be in the form of lower national health care expenditure.
1. Predictive modeling. The first lever is the aggregation of research data so that
PMP companies can perform predictive modeling for new drugs and determine
the most efficient and cost-effective allocation of RD resources. This “rational
drug design” means using simulations and modeling based on preclinical or
early clinical datasets along the RD value chain to predict clinical outcomes as
promptly as possible. The evaluation factors can include product safety, efficacy,
potential side effects, and overall trial outcomes. This predictive modeling can
reduce costs by suspending research and expensive clinical trials on suboptimal
compounds earlier in the research cycle.

The benefits of this lever for the PMP sector include lower RD costs and earlier
revenue from a leaner, faster, and more targeted RD pipeline. The lever helps to
bring drugs to market faster and produce more targeted compounds with a higher
potential market and therapeutic success rate. Predictive modeling can shave 3
to 5 years off the approximately 13 years it can take to bring a new compound to
market.

2. Statistical tools and algorithms to improve clinical trial design. Another lever
is using statistical tools and algorithms to improve the design of clinical trials and
the targeting of patient recruitment in the clinical phases of the RD process. This
lever includes mining patient data to expedite clinical trials by assessing patient
recruitment feasibility, recommending more effective protocol designs, and
suggesting trial sites with large numbers of potentially eligible patients and strong
track records. The techniques that can be employed include performing scenario
simulations and modeling to optimize label size (the range of indications applicable
to a given drug) to increase the probability of trial success rates. Algorithms can
combine RD and trial data with commercial modeling and historic regulatory
data to find the optimal trade-off between the size and characteristics of a targeted
patient population for trials and the chances of regulatory approval of the new
compound. Analyses can also improve the process of selecting investigators by
targeting those with proven performance records.
3. Analyzing clinical trials data. A third RD-related lever is analyzing clinical trials
data and patient records to identify additional indications and discover adverse
effects. Drug repositioning, or marketing for additional indications, may be

47

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possible after the statistical analysis of large outcome datasets to detect signals
of additional benefits. Analyzing the (near) real-time collection of adverse case
reports enables pharmacovigilance, surfacing safety signals too rare to appear in
a typical clinical trial or, in some cases, identifying events that were hinted at in the
clinical trials but that did not have sufficient statistical power.

These analytical programs can be particularly important in the current context in
which annual drug withdrawals hit an all-time high in 2008 and the overall number
of new drug approvals has been declining. Drug withdrawals are often very
publicly damaging to a company. The 2004 removal of the painkiller Vioxx from
the market resulted in around $7 billion in legal and claims costs for Merck and a
33 percent drop in shareholder value within just a few days.

4. Personalized medicine. Another promising big data innovation that could
produce value in the RD arena is the analysis of emerging large datasets (e.g.,
genome data) to improve RD productivity and develop personalized medicine.
The objective of this lever is to examine the relationships among genetic variation,
predisposition for specific diseases, and specific drug responses and then to
account for the genetic variability of individuals in the drug development process.

Personalized medicine holds the promise of improving health care in three main
ways: offering early detection and diagnosis before a patient develops disease
symptoms; more effective therapies because patients with the same diagnosis
can be segmented according to molecular signature matching (i.e., patients with
the same disease often don’t respond in the same way to the same therapy, partly
because of genetic variation); and the adjustment of drug dosages according to a
patient’s molecular profile to minimize side effects and maximize response.

Personalized medicine is in the early stages of development. Impressive initial
successes have been reported, particularly in the early detection of breast cancer,
in prenatal gene testing, and with dosage testing in the treatment of leukemia and
colorectal cancers. We estimate that the potential for cost savings by reducing the
prescription of drugs to which individual patients do not respond could be 30 to
70 percent of total cost in some cases. Likewise, earlier detection and treatment
could significantly lower the burden of lung cancer on health systems, given that
early-stage surgery costs are approximately half those of late-stage treatment.

5. Analyzing disease patterns. The fifth RD-related big data value creation lever is
analyzing disease patterns and trends to model future demand and costs and make
strategic RD investment decisions. This analysis can help PMP companies optimize
the focus of their RD as well as the allocation of resources including equipment and
staff.
New business models
The proliferation of digital health care data, from clinical to claims information, is
creating business models that can complement, or compete with, existing ones and
their levers. We highlight two potential new business models:
1. Aggregating and synthesizing patient clinical records and claims datasets.
The first type of new business model is one that aggregates and analyzes patient
records to provide data and services to third parties. Companies could build
robust clinical datasets that would enable a number of adjacent businesses.
These might include licensing and analyzing clinical outcomes data for payors
and regulators to improve clinical decision making, leveraging patient databases


to help PMP companies identify patients meeting certain criteria for inclusion
in a clinical trial, or providing access to clinical databases for the discovery of
biomarkers that help guide the selection of treatments. An adjacent market that
is developing not only provides services based on patient clinical records but
also integrates claims datasets to provide services to the PMP sector for RD
and commercial modeling. Clinical and claims data and services markets are
just beginning to develop and grow—the rate of their expansion will depend on
how rapidly the health care industry implements electronic medical records and
evidence-based medicine.
2. Online platforms and communities. Another potential new business model
enabled by big data is that of online platforms and communities, which are already
generating valuable data. Examples of this business model in practice include Web
sites such as PatientsLikeMe.com, where individuals can share their experience
as patients in the system; Sermo.com, a forum for physicians to share their medical
insights; and Participatorymedicine.org, a Web site made available by a nonprofit
organization that encourages patient activism. These online platforms could
become a valuable source of data. For example, Sermo charges the PMP sector for
access to its member physicians and information from their interactions on the site.
Public health
The use of big data can improve public health surveillance and response. By using
a nationwide patient and treatment database, public health officials can ensure the
rapid, coordinated detection of infectious diseases and a comprehensive outbreak
surveillance and response through an Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response
program. This lever offers numerous benefits, including a smaller number of claims and
payouts, thanks to a timely public health response that would result in a lower incidence
of infection. The United States would also be better prepared—in terms of laboratory
capacity, for instance—for emerging diseases and outbreaks. There would also be a
greater public awareness of the health risks related to infectious diseases, which, in
turn, would lower the chance of infections thanks to accurate and timely public health
advisories. Taken together, all these components would help to produce a better quality
of life.

BIG DATA CAN ENABLE MORE THAN $300 BILLION A YEAR IN
VALUE CREATION IN US HEALTH CARE
All the big-data-enabled levers that we have described can play a substantial
part in overhauling the productivity of the US health care system, improving the
quality of care and treatment, enhancing patients’ experience, boosting industry
competitiveness, and creating a range of fresh business models and services.
In total, we estimate that US health care could capture more than $300 billion in
value every year, with two-thirds of that in the form of reductions to national health
care expenditure of around 8 percent. Holding health care outcomes constant (a
conservative assumption considering that many of the levers will improve health
care quality, which is difficult to quantify), accounting for annual operating costs and
assuming that the value potential of each big data lever grows linearly with health
care expenditure, this would mean that the annual productivity of the US health care
sector could grow by an additional 0.7 percent. This productivity boost assumes that
the industry realizes all of the potential benefits from the use of big data over the next
ten years (Exhibit 15).43 As we have said, the actual amount of value that the sector will
43 This calculation factors in the ongoing operating costs of EMR across the nation, estimated
at around $20 billion a year, after initial deployment (estimated at up to $200 billion). See the
appendix for our productivity calculation.

49

50

capture will depend on the collective actions of health care organizations and policy
makers in overcoming structural and other barriers.
The benefits of these dramatic potential improvements would flow to patients,
providers, payors, and the PMP sector. However, using these levers would also
redistribute value among players throughout the industry as revenue and profits shift
and new, imaginative leaders emerge.
Exhibit 15
The estimated long-term value of identified levers is
more than $300 billion, with potentially more than
$200 billion savings on national health care spending
Value potential from use of big data
$ billion per year

Direct reduction on national
health care expenditure
Unclear impact on national
health care expenditure

Lever examples
RD

25

82

Predictive modeling to determine allocation of RD
resources, clinical trial design, and personalized medicine

108

Clinical
operations

165

Accounting/
pricing

Comparative effectiveness research (CER), clinical
decision support system, and dashboards for
transparency into clinical data

165
27

47

Advanced algorithms for fraud detection, performancebased drug pricing

Public health

9

Public health surveillance and response systems

New business
models

5

Aggregation of patient records to provide datasets and
insights; online platforms and communities

Total gross
value potential1

226

107

333

1 Excluding initial IT investments (~$120 billion–$200 billion) and annual operating costs (~$20 billion per annum).
SOURCE: Expert interviews; press and literature search; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

Patients would see lower costs for better care and have broader, clearer access to a
wider variety of health care information, making them more informed consumers of the
medical system. Patients would be able to compare not only the prices of drugs,
treatments, and physicians but also their relative effectiveness, enabling them to
choose more effective, better-targeted medicines, many customized to their personal
genetic and molecular makeup. Patients would also have access to a wider range of
information on epidemics and other public health information crucial to their well-being.
Providers, payors, and the PMP sector will experience a different set of benefits from
deploying big data levers. They need to be alert to resulting value shifts and changing
business models. Some levers should bring additional value to all stakeholders.
For example, by preventing adverse drug events, clinical decision support systems
should lead to fewer liability claims for payors, lower malpractice insurance rates for
providers, and better outcomes for patients. However, in the case of other levers, one
player might gain at the expense of another, a result that would ripple throughout the
industry, creating winners and losers at the bottom line. In the case of the adoption of
comparative effectiveness research, for instance, providers could see a reduction in
their revenue for treatments that are found not to be optimally effective. Remote patient
monitoring is another example. This lever will reduce errors and adverse treatment
effects and will improve the quality of care and life for those with chronic illnesses. But
it will do this by reducing the need for treatment at general hospitals and by cutting
adverse drug events, eroding some traditional sources of revenue for hospitals and
clinics.


The potential for reduced revenue may prove to be an incentive for hospitals and
clinics to look for ways to participate in the wave of new business models and
opportunities that big data levers are helping to create. These organizations may, for
instance, try to analyze and use patient databases to expand their preventive care
offerings. Entirely new business models will, of course, emerge, too. For example,
personal health records offered by Google Health and Microsoft Healthvault allow
consumers to create personal health profiles and goals, track treatments and
prescriptions, and monitor their experiences as patients.

BIG DATA HAVE SIGNIFICANT IMPLICATIONS FOR HEALTH CARE
EXECUTIVES AND POLICY MAKERS
It is widely recognized that the health reimbursement plans used in the United States
provide little incentive to identify waste, address known operational inefficiencies,
or improve productivity. These plans are based on payments for activities, including
diagnostic tests, drug prescriptions, physician visits, and procedures ordered, rather
than proven health outcomes. They reward a high volume of activity rather than the
quality, efficiency, or even necessity of that activity.
Moving toward performance- and outcome-driven reimbursement models will help
to align incentives that can help drive the adoption of these levers. Payors and their
customers can drive such change, enabled by regulators. The US Department of
Veterans Affairs and agencies in the United Kingdom, Italy, and Germany, among
others, are working on programs that base payment on effectiveness and patient
outcomes. Improving the quality and availability of information on comparisons of
treatments, drugs, physicians, and hospitals will help shift this model. Some efforts
already exist to rate hospitals and doctors and to create transparency about the cost
of different services, and these initiatives are gaining some traction with the public and
employers. But all of these results-oriented incentives will have to become embedded
and widely accepted in US health care if the big data levers we have discussed are to
become an integral part of the system and if their value is to be fully accessed.
It is clear that appropriately aligned incentives can push stakeholders to embrace
big data levers to improve performance. The pharmaceutical industry is an obvious
example. The industry began mining and aggregating sales and prescription data
because this lever helped companies improve their bottom line by more effectively
targeting sales, managing sales force resources, and selecting prime areas for RD.
At the same time, providers will have to invest significantly in deploying electronic
medical record systems, which provide a foundation for doing comparative
effectiveness research into treatments and drugs. Some estimates put that cost at
$80,000 to $100,000 per bed.44 Although providers will benefit considerably from
using such systems (e.g., time savings from pulling and maintaining paper charts), the
primary savings will accrue to payors and patients from the identification of the most
effective treatments and fewer adverse drug effects. Again, financial incentives would
have to be realigned—perhaps through government intervention—before nationwide
adoption of electronic medical records and health care information technology will
happen.
In addition to structural issues, health care executives will need to overcome challenges
related to technology, data access, talent, and changing mind-sets and behaviors to
capture value from big data. Technology requirements will vary widely among subsectors
44 Francois M. Laflamme, Wayne E. Pietraszek, and Nilesh V. Rajadhyax, “Reforming hospitals
with IT investment,” McKinsey Quarterly, August 2010.

51

52

and organizations. For instance, significant capital investments will frequently be required
to modernize and standardize IT systems and make them compatible to optimize the value
creation that can be gleaned from big data. To date, meaningful adoption of electronic
medical records continues to run at around 20 percent; the availability of federal incentives
could help to boost that rate.45 For many providers, putting the technology in place to
generate and capture digital clinical data is the key first step. This will be a formidable
challenge in itself because large-scale IT projects are notoriously difficult to execute.46 An
equally important task is to ensure that interoperable standards are in place so that data
generated at one provider can be accessed in a useful form by another.
For more sophisticated PMP companies, the big data technology enhancements
required may involve the provision of sufficient storage or the implementation of advanced
analytics. For others, the technology challenges will include consolidating fragmented
internal databases and making them consistent with one another in a format that will allow
an integrated view of information to be available as needed. In many organizations, the
internal accessibility and availability of various databases remains severely limited.
The power of many of the big data levers we’ve described depends on access to
data—and often at a scale beyond those that an individual organization generates.
These levers may require combining disparate sets of data such as patient records
and clinical claims data. Stakeholders in the industry do not often share existing
datasets, because of legal constraints such as privacy laws, a lack of incentives,
or incompatible IT systems or formats. The sensitive nature of health information,
and the potential for discrimination based on it, makes security and privacy rights
protection critical. Many countries have regulations such as HIPAA and HITECH, the
US laws designed to protect the security and privacy of health records. As using big
data becomes more important to the industry, policy makers may have to reevaluate
these laws or intervene to ensure that access to data is available in a safe and secure
way that also enables health care outcomes to be optimized.
Finally, the difficulties in recruiting and retaining the right talent and forging the right
mind-sets within institutions are among the most stubborn obstacles to capturing
the value opportunities of big data. Leaders who understand what types of valuable
insights can come from data and talent that can analyze large volumes of data are
essential. The willingness of employees to use data-driven insights in their decision
making is also critical. Capturing the cost savings of comparative effectiveness
research, for example, will require physicians to prescribe the most cost-effective
interventions according to guidelines derived from big data. But studies in many
clinical areas show that physicians often resist, or simply do not comply with, such
guidelines. Achieving such a shift will be difficult—but necessary.

45 National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Electronic
medical record/electronic health record use by office-based physicians,” December 2009;
Ashish K. Jha et al., “Use of electronic health records in US hospitals,” New England Journal of
Medicine 360(16), April 16, 2009:1628–38.
46 For more on the challenges of implementing IT successfully in health care providers and
payors, see “Debunking the three leading misperceptions about health care IT,” Health
International 2010, Number 10.


  
The US health care sector faces an urgent imperative to achieve a radical
improvement in its cost-effectiveness. Our research shows that a range of levers
using big data can be a critical enabler in reducing cost while at least maintaining
health care quality. However, the US health care industry will not achieve the
significant value available from big data without radical changes in regulations and
systemwide incentives. Achieving those changes will be difficult—but the potential
prize is so great that health care executives and policy makers should not ignore
these opportunities.

53

54

3b. Public sector administration (European Union)
Governments in many parts of the world are under increasing pressure to boost their
productivity—in other words, do more with less. Particularly in the aftermath of the recent
global recession, many governments are faced with having to continue to provide a
high level of public services at a time of significant budgetary constraint as they seek
to reduce large budget deficits and national debt levels built up when they spent public
money heavily to stimulate growth. Beyond the pressures of reducing debt levels, many
countries face medium- to long-term budgetary constraints caused by aging populations
that will significantly increase demand for medical and social services.
As recent MGI research has shown, the way that governments will need to cope
with such constraints is through achieving a step change in their (often relatively low)
productivity.47 While productivity in the public sector is not easy to measure, there is
evidence that public sector productivity growth has fallen behind that of the private
sector in many (or most) economies. Experimental estimates by the UK Office of
National Statistics showed declining productivity in the public sector from 1995 to
2005, while MGI research showed positive productivity growth in the market sector.48
In large part, the deteriorating productivity performance of the UK public sector was
the result of the government’s increasing employment.49
Can big data help the public sector raise its game on productivity? To attempt to
answer this question, we studied the administrative activities of the public sector, with
a focus on Europe (see Box 7, “How we studied public sector administration”). We
found that big data levers, such as increasing transparency and applying advanced
analytics, offer the public sector a powerful arsenal of strategies and techniques for
boosting productivity and achieving higher levels of efficiency and effectiveness.
Our research shows Europe’s public sector could potentially reduce the costs of
administrative activities by 15 to 20 percent, creating the equivalent of €150 billion to
€300 billion ($223 billion to $446 billion)—or even higher—in new value. This estimate
includes both efficiency gains and a reduction in the gap between actual and
potential collection of tax revenue. These levers could accelerate annual productivity
growth by up to 0.5 percentage points over the next ten years.
We believe that big data can play a similar role in other countries and regions, too.
Other governments around the world face many of the same social and economic
challenges, and the big data opportunities we discuss in this Europe-focused case
study will apply elsewhere, particularly in other developed countries and regions.

47 See Martin N. Baily, Karen Croxson, Thomas Dohrmann, and Lenny Mendonca, The public
sector productivity imperative, McKinsey Company, March 2011 (www.mckinsey.com/en/
Client_Service/Public_Sector/Latest_thinking/~/media/McKinsey/dotcom/client_service/
Public%20Sector/PDFS/Public%20Sector%20Productivity%20Imperative_March%202011.
ashx); and Tony Danker, Thomas Dohrmann, Nancy Killefer, and Lenny Mendonca, “How can
American government meet its productivity challenge?” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2006 (www.
mckinseyquarterly.com). Also see MGI reports Beyond austerity: A path to economic growth
and renewal in Europe, October 2010, and Growth and renewal in the United States: Retooling
America’s economic engine, February 2011 (www.mckinsey.com/.mgi).
48 Note that market sector refers to the private sector plus that part of the public sector that sells
goods or services for a fee. Also, it should be noted that public sector productivity figures
are experimental, outcome-based (not adjusted for value), and divided by total inputs, while
market sector productivity figures are based on value added and labor inputs. Experimental
estimates are those made using cutting-edge, and therefore not proven, methodologies.
49 From austerity to prosperity: Seven priorities for the long term, McKinsey Global Institute,
November 2010 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).


Box 7. How we studied public sector administration
The public sector offers particular challenges because it is so tremendously
diverse in its functions and budgets. We have focused on administration in two
common types of government agencies, tax and labor, and then extended
our analysis to other relevant parts of the government. Administrative work is
arguably the foundation of many public sector functions and agencies, and
many aspects of this type of work are common across agencies. Typically,
administrative work features many “customer” interactions and generates a
high volume of forms and/or payments to process.
The work of tax and labor agencies is a classic example. The main activities
of tax agencies include submissions processing, examinations, collections,
and taxpayer services, all on a large scale. Labor agencies perform a variety
of analytical functions, including examining markets, screening customers,
and then distributing appropriate benefits and employment services. Other
agencies, including transportation and immigration, have similar functions and
responsibilities. Private sector activities including the processing of insurance
claims also involve similar administrative tasks, and we can draw additional
insights from what we know of these activities in the private sector.
We began by conducting microanalyses of tax and labor agencies in which we
identified and estimated the size of the potential value that big levers can create.
We then extrapolated these findings to estimate the value potential of those levers
in other similar departments. Some of the levers we discovered were specific
to the tax and labor agencies, including levers aimed at reducing the tax gap or
reducing fraudulent benefit payments. However, many efficiency levers such
as performance dashboards and data integration and mashups are relevant for
many other agencies, too (see appendix for more detail on our methodology).

THE PUBLIC SECTOR FACES A SIGNIFICANT PERFORMANCE
CHALLENGE
Europe’s public sector accounts for almost half of GDP, including transfer payments
that account for about 20 percent.50 Excluding transfer payments, about 10 to
30 percent of this share is attributable to administration.51 This high share of overall
economic output puts considerable long-term strain on Europe’s budgetary and debt
positions—over and above the impact of the recent global recession. Today, levels
of public debt are already high, and previous MGI research demonstrates that the
process of reducing debt after recessions is a lengthy one.52
Compounding the budgetary pressures faced by Europe’s government is the
continent’s aging demographic. By 2025, close to 30 percent of the population in
mature economies across the globe will be aged 60 or over, up from 20 percent in
2000. Social security, health, and pensions will all face increasing demand (Exhibit 16).

50 OECD statistical database.
51 Transfer payments redistribute income in the market system. Examples include welfare
(financial aid), social security, and government subsidies for certain businesses (firms).
52 Debt and deleveraging: The global credit bubble and its economic consequences, McKinsey
Global Institute, January 2010 (www.mckinsey.com/mgi).

55

56

Exhibit 16
Aging populations will be a burden on government budgets

2007

Age-related government expenditure
% of GDP
Western Europe
(EU–15)

2035

10.2

Pensions

Total

9.2

12.0

9.6

6.9

Health care

Long-term care

Eastern Europe
(EU–10)

4.7

7.9

5.5

1.3

0.3

1.9

0.5
18.4

14.2
21.8

15.6

SOURCE: European Commission, Economic and budgetary for the EU-27 member states (2008–60)

WHAT KINDS OF DATA DO PUBLIC SECTOR ADMINISTRATION
GENERATE?
Data generated in public sector administration are primarily textual or numerical.
So, in comparison with sectors such as the provision of health care that generates
substantial amounts of multimedia content (extensive electronic imaging, for
instance, in addition to text), we find that public sector administration tends to
generate a lower—but still substantial—volume of unique data as measured in bytes.
However, in contrast to health care, the vast majority—up to 90 percent—of the data
generated in public sector administration is created in digital form, partly as a result of
e-government initiatives undertaken during the past 15 years.
However, even in countries whose e-government programs are the most advanced,
public sector agencies often do not make data available in an effective manner
either across organizational silos or to citizens and businesses. Formatting and
input protocols are often inconsistent. Instead of moving data electronically, it is not
uncommon for an employee in one agency to receive a faxed copy or mailed CD of
data from another agency, even though those data may be stored electronically. And
there are some policy and/or legal restrictions that prevent data sharing.
Lack of transparency into government performance data can also be a contributing factor
to the productivity challenges mentioned previously. It is difficult to improve activities that
aren’t measured, and the relative lack of transparency into public sector performance and
productivity metrics is a contributing factor to the productivity gap described earlier.

THE PUBLIC SECTOR CAN USE BIG DATA LEVERS IN EACH OF THE
FIVE CATEGORIES WE HAVE IDENTIFIED
The public sector in Europe and beyond has the opportunity to deploy big data levers
in each of the five broad categories that emerge from our research across sectors.
The levers that we discuss apply to tax and labor agencies, but we believe that their
use can be just as relevant in other parts of the public sector.


1. Creating transparency
Both external stakeholders such as citizens and businesses and internal stakeholders
such as government employees and agencies can improve their efficiency when data
from large public sector databases are made more accessible. For example, government
agencies regularly collect a large amount of data on individuals and businesses through
various regulatory and other filings. Yet citizens and businesses frequently have to fill out
forms for which some of the data have already been collected and stored. If agencies
were to pre-fill forms for citizens and businesses from data already stored in government
databases, this would save time for the submitters of forms as well as government
agencies that would not have to re-input data. Pre-filling would also have the advantage of
reducing errors and speeding up processing time. Taking this approach would, however,
require policy and statutory barriers to sharing data to be overcome.
The Swedish Tax Agency pre-fills forms for its citizens, including income data and
the previous year’s taxes paid. The agency allows citizens to confirm or change that
information using short message service (SMS) by cell phone or Internet. The potential
time savings for taxpayers can be significant. In the United States, for instance, individual
taxpayers spend an estimated 5 to 20 hours or more on tax filing activities. Pre-filling
can also make substantial time savings for tax authorities. One tax authority was able to
redeploy about 15 percent of staff assigned to the processing of submissions.
Government employees and their respective agencies can also benefit from making
data available across agencies and organizational silos. This can reduce search times
between and within agencies, which can make up a significant portion of government
employees’ time. One tax agency was able to redeploy 20 percent of its full-time
employees by gaining online access to a housing transfer deed databases rather than
collecting the data from another government agency on physical media (CDs) and
manually searching through the data.
Increasingly more governments (at all levels) are beginning to adopt “open data”
principles in which they make more raw government databases available to the
public. Data.gov.uk in the United Kingdom and the Aporta Web portal in Spain (www.
proyectoaporta.es) are central Web sites that are examples of this trend, in which
external stakeholders can access more and more large databases. Such efforts have
unlocked a tremendous amount of innovation that combines data from multiple sources
(e.g., “official” government information from law enforcement and public works with
“unofficial” citizen-reported information from social media) to create services such as
hyperlocal news that describes events specific to a city block. Other examples, including
expectmore.gov and Dr. Foster Intelligence, which provides health care information to
UK citizens, are designed to measure program performance directly (see item 5 in this
section on new business models for further discussion of these possibilities).
2. Enabling experimentation to discover needs, expose variability, and
improve performance
One highly valuable contribution that big data can make is to uncover tremendous
variability in performance within different parts of a government agency that are
performing broadly similar functions—a variability that doesn’t show up at the
aggregate level. Such information can be a very valuable opportunity for improving
the performance of operating units within an agency. For example, performance
dashboards that display operational and financial data allow an agency to measure
and compare the performance of its different units and develop approaches to
improve productivity. Observers tend to cite a lack of external competition as an
explanation for the relatively low productivity in public sector administration, and this

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58

certainly plays a part. But even in a context of weak competitive pressure, the ability
to expose variation in performance among different public sector units can create
internal competition that drives performance higher. Even in the absence of tangible
financial rewards for improving performance, managers in subpar units will often
want to improve on that performance because they feel uncomfortable being shown
publicly to be toward the bottom of the agency pile (although they may also work
harder to boost performance because this might enhance their chances of promotion
and more pay down the line).53
Best practice tax agencies use integrated monthly scorecards that measure revenue
collected and that track customer satisfaction scores, staff engagement scores,
and feedback from the public and agency heads. Elevating the bottom quartile in
performance terms by one or two quartiles can be a large opportunity to improve
efficiency. While private sector business units can vary in their performance by
a factor of two, public sector units can vary by a factor of six.54 Agencies with
counterparts in other countries can extend their comparisons of performance from
internal to global benchmarks (Exhibit 17).
Exhibit 17
Tax agencies in different countries vary in their performance levels
Performance scores indexed to 100

Collections

Submissions

Taxpayer service

100

Examinations

90
80
70
60

Average
performance
indexed to
50

50
40
30
20
10
0

0
1
Countries

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

SOURCE: McKinsey tax benchmarking study (includes analysis of 13 countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile,
Denmark, France, Ireland, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the United States)

Comparison engines can allow public sector administrators to measure and rank the
performance of vendors and service providers. Procurement typically offers a large
opportunity for cost savings for government as purchasing accounts on average for
about one-third of public sector spending (excluding transfer payments). McKinsey’s
experience of working on public sector projects suggests that government can,
on average, generate savings of up to 30 percent from awarding contracts more
effectively across a range of services and goods.55

53 Some managers in public sector do receive bonuses for strong performance. For more on
using status rewards to motivate good performance, see Timothy Besley and Maitreesh
Ghatak, “Status incentives,” American Economic Review 98(2), 2008: 206–11.
54 McKinsey conducted an in-depth benchmarking of 13 tax agencies globally in 2008 and 2009.
For the findings, see Thomas Dohrmann and Gary Pinshaw, The road to improved compliance,
McKinsey white paper, September 2009.
55 Percent as a basis of procurement cost; see Christian Husted and Nicolas Reinecke,
“Improving public-sector purchasing,” McKinsey on Government, 2009.


Citizens and external stakeholders can also use public sector data that expose
variability in performance. In the United Kingdom, the government is making data on
health care outcomes available so that citizens can make more informed decisions
about providers. In similar fashion, making data available on educational outcomes at
primary and secondary schools can allow parents to make more informed decisions
about where to live or in which schools to place their children. In addition to arming
consumers of such public services with the information they need to make effective
choices, making these types of data openly available is likely to incentivize providers
of such services to improve their performance.
3. Segmenting populations to customize actions
Using segmentation to tailor services to individuals has long been an accepted
practice in the private sector. However, the ethos of the public sector tends to be
that governments should provide exactly the same services to all citizens. Our
research shows that segmenting and tailoring government services to individuals and
population cohorts can increase effectiveness, efficiency, and citizen satisfaction.
For example, Bundesagentur für Arbeit (German Federal Labor Agency, or BA for
short) analyzed its huge amount of historical data on its customers, including histories
of unemployed workers, the interventions that it took, and outcomes including data
on how long it took people to find a job. The idea was to develop a segmentation
based on this analysis so that the agency could tailor its interventions for unemployed
workers. This process, along with other initiatives applied over three years, allowed
the agency to reduce its spending by €10 billion ($14.9 billion) annually at the same
time as cutting the amount of time that unemployed workers took to find employment,
and increasing the satisfaction among users of its services (see Box 8, “Germany’s
federal labor agency has used big data to cut significant cost from its operations”).
Similarly, best practice tax agencies are using big data to segment individual and
business taxpayers, separating them into categories and classes for examination
and collection activities. For example, these agencies can categorize taxpayers by
geography, their compliance history, potential risk of default, collection difficulty, and, of
course, income level and demographics. Using effective segmentation can help close the
gap between actual and potential collections by up to 10 percent. At the same time, more
targeted interactions can increase customer satisfaction by as much as 15 percent.
4. Replacing/supporting human decision making with automated
algorithms
Some of the more sophisticated applications of big data use automated algorithms to
analyze large datasets in order to help make better decisions. These types of techniques
can often be very effectively applied in compliance activities, for example, among public
sector agencies that need to find anomalies in payments such as in tax collections or
benefit payments from labor or social security departments. Sophisticated tax agencies
apply automated algorithms that perform systematic, multilevel checks on tax returns
and automatically flag returns that require further examination or auditing. This approach
can improve collections considerably, reducing the tax gap by up to 10 percentage
points. Similar methods can be used by other agencies to play an effective role in
counterterrorism and child protection.
Algorithms can crawl through big data from a variety of sources, identifying
inconsistencies, errors, and fraud. For instance, rule-based algorithms can flag
suspicious correlations such as a person receiving unemployment benefits while filing
for a work-related accident. Using more sophisticated and well-tuned algorithmic
techniques such as neural networks can reduce the probability of both false positives

59

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(selecting an item for further examination that does not have an issue) and false negatives
(not selecting an item for further examination where there is an issue). After using
automated analyses, BA reported a 20 percent reduction in erroneously paid benefits.

Box 8. Germany’s federal labor agency has used big data to cut
significant cost from its operations
The Bundesagentur für Arbeit (German Federal Labor Agency, or BA for
short), with a €54 billion annual budget and 120,000 full-time employees, has
sharply improved its customer services and cut around €10 billion of costs
in recent years by using big data strategies (Exhibit 18). BA finds jobs for the
unemployed and provides a full range of counseling and support services
through ten regional centers and 178 employment agencies.
The agency built capabilities for producing and analyzing data that enabled a
range of new programs and new approaches to existing programs. BA is now able
to analyze outcomes data for its placement programs more accurately, spotting
those programs that are relatively ineffective and improving or eliminating them. The
agency has greatly refined its ability to define and evaluate the characteristics of
its unemployed and partially employed customers. As a result, BA has developed
a segmented approach that helps the agency offer more effective placement
and counseling to more carefully targeted customer segments. Surveys of their
customers show that they perceive and highly approve of the changes BA is making.
Exhibit 18
Germany has achieved a significant reduction in its spending on active
labor market policies without an increase in national unemployment
Disposable budget for active labor market policies, 2003–10
€ billion
13.5
10.3

4.4

3.3

3.3

3.6

4.5

4.3

2003
Persons
unemployed
Million

04

05

06

07

08

09

2010

4.4

4.4

4.9

4.5

3.8

3.3

3.4

3.2

SOURCE: Bundesagentur für Arbeit; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

5. Innovating new business models, products, and services with big data
Big data from government can unlock innovation both inside and outside the public sector.
Providing readily accessible big data tools and analytics can allow commercial, nonprofit,
and individual third parties to create new value for the public sector in a variety of ways.
These could include feedback on services, insight into better management practices,
and suggestions for improving new and existing programs. Big data innovation can
lead to experiments in public policy and public sector programs to improve government
performance. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the nonprofit Open Knowledge


Foundation used databases made available through the government’s open data initiative
to develop wheredoesmymoneygo.org, a site that makes it easier for citizens to view and
understand UK public spending through analysis and visualization of the data.56
The startup company BrightScope mined data from the US Department of Labor
about 401(k) management fees paid by employers and discovered that small
businesses were paying in excess of $4 billion more in management fees than bigger
companies. Based on those data, and data from a few public sources such as the
Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Census Bureau, BrightScope now
provides an online tool to rate 401(k) plans quantitatively.
In April 2011, a consortium of European open data organizations announced an
“open data challenge,” a contest for designers, developers, researchers, and the
general public to come up with ideas, applications, visualizations, and derived
datasets based on datasets produced by European public bodies. The consortium
made €20,000 in prize money available. This project was partly inspired by the
District of Columbia’s Apps for Democracy contest, which attracted more than 40
successful applications worth at least $2 million to the DC municipal government at a
total cost of $50,000.
As in the other industry and business sectors we studied, significant value can be
captured merely by making data available and transparent (and applying simple
analytics). Potential gains increase sharply as stakeholders move to advanced analytics
techniques such as applying complex algorithms and segmentation techniques.

THE POTENTIAL BENEFITS OF BIG DATA IN PUBLIC SECTOR
ADMINISTRATION
Across Europe’s public sector, the big data levers we identified for administration
can bring three main categories of quantifiable monetary value as long as the right
policies and enablers are in place. These are cost savings from operational efficiency,
a reduction in the cost of errors and fraud in benefit administration, and an increase
in tax receipts by narrowing the tax gap. We estimate that the efficiency levers we
have identified apply to 20 to 25 percent of operating budgets with potential savings
of 15 to 20 percent. Reducing error and the cost of benefits received fraudulently is
possible in an estimated 1 to 3 percent of transfer payments (note that this accounts
for the portion of transfer payments that have nonnegligible amounts of error and
fraud and the estimated percentage cost of error and fraud), saving up to 40 percent
of the cost incurred from these sources.57 With respect to increasing tax receipts,
we estimate the tax gap to be in the range of 5 to 10 percent of total European tax
receipts and that up to 20 percent of that can be recouped. Altogether, the public
sectors of Europe’s 23 largest governments could potentially create €150 billion
to €300 billion—and potentially more—in new value annually over ten years. This
implies boosting annual productivity growth rates in the public sector by about
0.5 percentage points above those expected, if current trends hold (Exhibit 19).

56 See Jason Baumgarten and Michael Chui, “E-government 2.0,” McKinsey Quarterly, July 2009
for a story about the Sunlight Foundation, an organization that created a similar site in the
United States.
57 Based on studies done by governments, we estimate that fraud or error can affect approximately
55 percent of transfer payments and that this error and fraud can boost costs by up to 3 percent.

61

62

Exhibit 19
Big data has the potential to create €150 billion to €300 billion or more in
value across the OECD-Europe public sector
Total base1
€ billion
Operational
efficiency
savings

Operating
expenditure

4,000

Reduction in
fraud and
error

Transfer
payment

2,500

Tax revenue

5,400

Increase in
tax collection



Addressable
%



Reduction
%



Total value
€ billion

15–20

120–200

1–32

30–40

7–30

5–103

10–20

25–110

20–25

150–300+
1 Base for operational efficiency savings is total government expenditure net of transfer payments; base for reduction in fraud is
total government transfer payments; base for increase in tax collection is tax revenue.
2 Takes into account the percentage of transfer payment that can have fraud/error as well as the estimated cost of error and fraud.
3 In the case of tax collection, the percentage addressable refers to the percentage estimated tax gap.
SOURCE: International Monetary Fund; OECD; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

In addition, big data can deliver a range of substantial nonmonetary gains in the public
sector, including the improved allocation of funding into programs, higher-quality
services, increased public sector accountability, a better-informed citizenry, and almost
certainly enhanced public trust in government.58 After one of the EU labor agencies
began segmenting its services, there was a documented increase in the quality
of interaction between the agency’s customers and case managers. Citizens and
business can spend less time and effort in their interactions with government agencies
and receive services better targeted to their needs. Greater transparency of information
creates improved accountability in public sector agencies and improved public trust.
Dashboards and comparative engines offer citizens the means of measuring the
effectiveness of programs and policies. One of the hidden benefits of making citizens’
own data available to them is that they are usually the most motivated to ensure
that those records are accurate. So giving citizens the ability to correct erroneous
personal information in agency databases electronically can improve the accuracy of
government databases. All of the levers we have discussed can lead to more informed
and better decisions by citizens, policy makers, and public sector executives.

PUBLIC SECTOR LEADERS NEED TO ADDRESS A RANGE OF ISSUES
TO USE BIG DATA EFFECTIVELY
Public sector leaders who want to realize the value potential offered by big data need
to address a number of internal and external issues. These include implementing
appropriate technology, recruiting and training talented personnel, and managing
change within their organizations. Just as important, government will need to use policy
to support the capture of value from big data and the sharing of data across agencies.
The first task is to establish a culture within the public sector in which decisions aimed
at improving performance are made on the basis of data. Only when the government
makes its performance goals and supporting data transparent will government
agencies and the public engage more meaningfully in those objectives. When the
58 These improvements in the quality of government services provided were not included in the
productivity calculation.


government establishes institutions to review its accountability and productivity,
citizens and public sector employees “get the message.”
Fortunately, many of the data in the public sector administrative functions of
developed countries are already in digital form, but agencies vary significantly in the
sophistication with which they handle that digital information.59 Some agencies will
still need to deal with issues such as inconsistent data formats and definitions, and
problems associated with legacy systems. The ability to integrate different datasets
will be critical to, for example, enabling tax agencies to pre-fill taxpayers’ forms
and screen them automatically, and labor agencies to accurately integrate data on
the unemployed so that they can target services more efficiently. Anecdotally, tax
agencies in Europe and in other regions report difficulties in obtaining and using data
from other agencies because of incompatible data formats.
Recruiting and retaining analytical talent will be a critical issue for public sector
agencies, just as it is in the private sector. Arguably the analytical talent gap will be even
greater in the public sector, given its lackluster track record of competing for top talent,
and it is vital that public sector leaders understand the need to tackle this shortfall.
There will also be increasing demand for personnel who can effectively manage and
adapt to change, and some governments will need to overcome a culture in which
seniority reigns and blunts the impact of incentives for better performance. The public
sector needs to change the attitude of employees toward data sharing and use, offering
appropriate incentives and systems to ensure that the insights derived from big data
actually drive the actions and decisions in organizations. The mind-set of employees
can be as great a barrier to realizing value from big data as technological inadequacy.
In the area of balancing privacy rights and data access, action across departments is
likely to be helpful. New laws or regulations may be necessary to enable government
agencies to access data from their counterparts in other parts of the system while
protecting the security of that information and privacy of its subjects. Policy makers
need to make decisions on privacy in conjunction with public opinion, informing
citizens about the trade-offs between the privacy and security risks of sharing data
and the benefits of sharing data.
  
The public sector in advanced economies is facing unprecedented pressures
to improve productivity, and our analysis of public administration in Europe
demonstrates that big data levers can make a significant contribution to this effort
around the world. Using big data intelligently has the potential to generate significant
value for the public sector as long as action is taken to overcome technological
barriers, to recruit and retrain people with the appropriate skills, and to manage the
changes needed within organizations to embrace and leverage big data.

59 This observation refers to the government administrative functions studied in this deep dive,
which did not include education or government-run health care. For much of Europe, online
delivery of public services has made steady progress. The most basic 20 eServices (including
online tax returns and school enrollments) stood at an average availability of 82 percent across
Europe in 2010. For more, see Digitizing public services in Europe: Putting ambition to action,
European Commission, December 2010.

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3c. Retail (United States)
In the US retail industry, the use of information technology and digital data has been
instrumental in boosting the profitability of individual players and the productivity
of the entire sector for decades. In the coming years, the continued adoption and
development of big data levers have the potential to further increase sector-wide
productivity by at least 0.5 percent a year through 2020. Among individual firms,
these levers could increase operating margins by more than 60 percent for those
pioneers that maximize their use of big data. Such a boost in profitability would be
especially significant in a sector where margins are notoriously tight. This is also
a rich domain in which to examine interactions between retailers and consumers.
This is an area in which digital data are playing an increasing role as consumers
search, research, compare, buy, and obtain support online, and the products sold by
retailers increasingly generate their own digital data. Of course, the value that players
in the retail sector and their customers will actually capture will depend critically
on the actions of retailers to overcome barriers related to technology, talent, and
organizational culture.
This study focuses on the US retail sector, but we also draw on the best practices and
experiences of companies around the world. The potential positive impact from the
majority of the big data levers we describe would almost certainly be similar in other
developed nations. We examined the application of big data in the majority of retail
subsectors as described by the standard North American Industry Classification
System (NAICS). Specifically, we include in our analysis those subsectors in which
customers make small- to moderate-sized average individual purchases and those
with a moderate to high frequency of interaction (see Box 9, “Which retail subsectors
did we study?”). We do not include the private-label businesses of retailers. We cover
suppliers of goods in our case study on manufacturing.

Box 9. Which retail subsectors did we study?
We looked at 10 of the 12 NAICS retail subsectors for our analysis: health and
personal care; general merchandise; building materials and garden equipment;
nonstore retailers; food and beverage; clothing and accessories; sporting
goods, hobby, book, and music; electronics and appliances; miscellaneous;
and furniture and home furnishings.
We did not include motor vehicle and parts dealers or gas stations. The primary
reason for excluding motor vehicle dealers was that the frequency of purchases
of motor vehicles, often the second-most valuable item in a household after a
home itself, is relatively rare, so the level of interactions with consumers is also at
a different scale and frequency compared with other retail subsectors. We chose
not to cover gas stations because the sale of a commodity (gasoline) makes it less
comparable to other retail subsectors with far more variety in products and whose
input costs are less dominated by a single volatile factor (oil prices).

RETAIL IS AN IMPORTANT COMPONENT OF THE US ECONOMY,
BUT PROFITABILITY IS UNDER INTENSE PRESSURE
Retail makes up a sizable part of the US economy. In 2009, that share was an
estimated 6 percent of the economy, down a percentage point from 2000. Industry
forecasts point to only modest growth over the next five years as the sector steadily,


65

but slowly, recovers from recession. Historical trends have demonstrated that there is
a close relationship between growth in retail and that of developed market economies
as a whole. As a matter of reference, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is
predicting annual US GDP growth of 2.7 percent through 2015.
Retail’s share of overall consumer spending has been in decline, falling from
50 percent in 1990 to 42 percent in 2009. And the sector’s profitability is under
intense pressure, squeezed both by suppliers, who have been capturing an
increasing amount of surplus, and by customers, who are putting pressure on prices.
For every $1.00 of operating profit on consumer goods in 2008, retailers collected
approximately $0.31, down from $0.60 in 1999, while suppliers, packagers, and
others below retail on the value chain received $0.69 (Exhibit 20).
Exhibit 20
Downward pricing pressure on retailers from suppliers has squeezed
retailers’ portion of the consumer profit pool
Operating profit pool for consumer goods
%
100

▪

80

For every $1.00 of
operating profit
today, retailers
receive
approximately $0.31,
while consumer
packaged goods
(CPG) receive $0.69

▪

90

Further pricing
pressures will erode
the $0.31 of
operating profit that
the retailer currently
controls

Retailer

70
60
50
40
30
20

CPG

10
0
1998 99

2000 01

02

03

04

05

06

07 2008

SOURCE: Bernstein; McKinsey analysis

A number of big data developments will put more downward pricing pressure
on retailers. This squeeze will come from a variety of new technologies that give
shoppers powerful pricing, promotional, and product information, frequently in real
time. Applications such as RedLaser, for instance, let shoppers scan the bar code
of an item in-store with their smartphones and obtain immediate price and product
comparisons. In addition, the adoption of online and mobile commerce (more than
50 percent of retail sales will be online or influenced by online channels by 2014)
could provide a huge increase in price transparency that will shift immense value
to consumers (Exhibit 21). This trend is likely to erode margins for retailers that are
competing solely on price. It is already clear that where shoppers have easy access
to cross-retailer price comparisons, prices tend to be materially lower.60

60 There is a long history of academic literature on the relationship between advertising (online
and offline) and prices that has covered products from eyeglasses to alcohol and services
such as attorneys. See, for example, Lee Benham, “The effect of advertising on the price of
eyeglasses,” Journal of Law and Economics 15(2), October 1972: 337–52.

66

Exhibit 21
US online and Web-influenced retail sales are forecast to become more
than half of all sales by 2013
$ billion

Online retail sales

1,072
155

1,194
173

1,307
192

1,423
210

1,542
230

1,658
249

% of total
US sales

1,213

1,409

1,115

1,312

1,021

2009

Web-influenced
retail sales

10

11

12

13

2014

42

46

48

50

51

53

917

SOURCE: Forrester Research Web-influenced retail sales forecast, December 2009

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TRENDS OFFER SIGNIFICANT NEW
OPPORTUNITIES TO CREATE VALUE IN RETAIL
While big data linked to new technology does squeeze the industry in some ways, it
also offers significant new opportunities for creating value. Sector retailers and their
competitors are in a constant race to identify and implement those big data levers
that will give them an edge in the market. The volume of data is growing inexorably
as retailers not only record every customer transaction and operation but also keep
track of emerging data sources such as radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips
that track products, and online customer behavior and sentiment.
In fact, US retail has been leveraging information technology for decades. Point-ofsale transactional data, primarily obtained from the use of bar codes, first appeared
in the 1970s.61 Since the 1990s, many leading retailers have been using store-level
and supply chain data to optimize distribution and logistics, sharpen merchandise
planning and management, and upgrade store operations. In previous MGI research
on the acceleration of productivity in general merchandise retail in the 1990s, we
found that Wal-Mart directly and indirectly caused the bulk of the productivity
acceleration through ongoing managerial innovation (e.g., big-box formats, everyday
low price) that increased competitive intensity and drove the diffusion of managerial
and technological best practices.62 Wal-Mart pioneered the expansion of an
electronic data interchange system to connect its supply chain electronically. WalMart also developed “Retail Link,” a tool that gives its suppliers a view of demand in its
stores so that they know when stores should be restocked rather than waiting for an
order from Wal-Mart. This “vendor-managed inventory” was a revolutionary concept
when it was introduced in the late 1980s. Both of these initiatives improved the
61 A package of Wrigley’s chewing gum was the first grocery item scanned using Universal
Product Code—in a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in 1974.
62 For more on drivers of productivity, in particular technology in the retail sector in the 1990s,
see How IT enables productivity growth, McKinsey Global Institute, November 2002 (www.
mckinsey.com/mgi).


retailer’s capital and labor productivity and cost position. When other retailers moved
in the 1990s to emulate what Wal-Mart had pioneered in order to remain competitive,
productivity surged across the industry.
Today, leading players are mining customer data to inform decisions they make about
managing their supply chain to merchandising and pricing. Wal-Mart’s detailed
and cost-efficient customer tracking gives the retailer the ability to mine petabytes
of data on customer preferences and buying behavior, and thereby win important
pricing and distribution concessions from consumer product goods companies.
Retailers across the industry are becoming more sophisticated in slicing and dicing
big data they collect from multiple sales channels, catalogs, stores, and online
interactions. The widespread use of increasingly granular customer data can enable
retailers to improve the effectiveness of their marketing and merchandising. Big data
levers applied to operations and supply chains will continue to reduce costs and
increasingly create new competitive advantages and strategies for growing retailers’
revenue.

MGI HAS IDENTIFIED 16 BIG DATA LEVERS IN RETAIL
We have identified 16 big data retail levers that retailers can employ along the value
chain. These levers fall into in the five main categories of marketing, merchandising,
operations, supply chain, and new business models (Exhibit 22).
Exhibit 22
Big data retail levers can be grouped by function
Function

Big data lever

Marketing

▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪

Cross-selling
Location based marketing
In-store behavior analysis
Customer micro-segmentation
Sentiment analysis
Enhancing the multichannel
consumer experience

Merchandising

▪
▪
▪

Assortment optimization
Pricing optimization
Placement and design
optimization

Operations

▪
▪

Performance transparency
Labor inputs optimization

Supply chain

▪
▪

Inventory management
Distribution and logistics
optimization
Informing supplier negotiations

New business models

▪
▪
▪

Price comparison services
Web-based markets


Marketing
1. Cross-selling. State-of-the-art cross-selling uses all the data that can be known
about a customer, including the customer’s demographics, purchase history,
preferences, real-time locations, and other facts to increase the average purchase
size. For example, Amazon.com employs collaborative filtering to generate
“you might also want” prompts for each product bought or visited. At one point,
Amazon reported that 30 percent of sales were due to its recommendation
engine. Another example of this lever is using big data analyses to optimize
in-store promotions that link complementary items and bundled products.

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2. Location-based marketing. Location-based marketing relies on the growing
adoption of smartphones and other personal location data-enabled mobile
devices. It targets consumers who are close to stores or already in them. For
instance, as a consumer approaches an apparel store, that store may send a
special offer on a sweater to the customer’s smartphone. The startup PlaceCast
claims that more than 50 percent of its users have made a purchase as a result of
such location-based ads. Nearly 50 percent of smartphone owners use or plan to
use their phones for mobile shopping.63
3. In-store behavior analysis. Analyzing data on in-store behavior can help improve
store layout, product mix, and shelf positioning. Recent innovations have enabled
retailers to track customers’ shopping patterns (e.g., footpath and time spent
in different parts of a store), drawing real-time location data from smartphone
applications (e.g., Shopkick), shopping cart transponders, or passively monitoring
the location of mobile phones within a retail environment. Some retailers use
sophisticated image-analysis software connected to their video-surveillance
cameras to track in-store traffic patterns and consumer behavior.
4. Customer micro-segmentation. The next marketing-related big data lever is
customer micro-segmentation. Although this is a familiar idea in retail, big data
has enabled tremendous innovation in recent years. The amount of data available
for segmentation has exploded, and the increasing sophistication in analytic
tools has enabled the division into ever more granular micro-segments—to the
point at which some retailers can claim to be engaged in personalization, rather
than simply segmentation. In addition to using traditional market-research data
and data on historical purchases, retailers can now track and leverage data on
the behavior of individual customers—including clickstream data from the Web.
Retailers can now update this increasingly granular data in near real time to adjust
to customer changes. Neiman Marcus, a high-end retailer, has developed both
behavioral segmentation and a multi-tier membership reward program, and this
combination has led to substantially more purchases of higher margin products
from its most affluent, higher-margin customers.
5. Sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis leverages the voluminous streams of data
generated by consumers in the various forms of social media to help inform a variety
of business decisions. For example, retailers can use sentiment analysis to gauge
the real-time response to marketing campaigns and adjust course accordingly. The
evolving field of social media data analysis plays a key role because consumers are
relying increasingly on peer sentiment and recommendations to make purchasing
decisions. A variety of tools has emerged for the real-time monitoring and response
to Web-based consumer behavior and choices.
6. Enhancing the multichannel consumer experience. Enhancing the multichannel
experience for consumers can be a powerful driver of sales, customer satisfaction,
and loyalty. Retailers can use big data to integrate promotions and pricing for
shoppers seamlessly, whether those consumers are online, in-store, or perusing a
catalog. Williams-Sonoma, for example, has integrated customer databases with
information on some 60 million households, tracking such things as their income,
housing values, and number of children. Targeted e-mails based on this information
obtain ten to 18 times the response rate of e-mails that are not targeted, and the
company is able to create different versions of its catalogs attuned to the behavior
and preferences of different groups of customers.
63 ABI research, Consumer Technology Barometer: Mobile, 2010.


Merchandising
1. Assortment optimization. Deciding which products to carry in which stores based
on local demographics, buyer perception, and other big data—so-called assortment
optimization—can increase sales materially. One leading drug retailer, for example,
used consumer research, market and competitive analysis, and detailed economic
modeling to identify the causes of its flat and declining growth at the category level. It
reduced its overall stock-keeping unit (SKU) count by 17 percent, shifted private-label
brands from 10 percent of the product mix to 14 percent, and achieved a 3 percent
earnings boost as well as a 2 percent increase in sales.
2. Price optimization. Retailers today can take advantage of the increasing
granularity of data on pricing and sales and use higher levels of analytical
horsepower to take pricing optimization to a new level. A variety of data sources
can be used to assess and inform pricing decisions in near real time. Complex
demand-elasticity models examine historical sales data to derive insights into
pricing at the SKU level, including markdown pricing and scheduling. Retailers
can use the resulting data to analyze promotion events and evaluate sources
of sales lift and any underlying costs that these might entail. One food retailer
examines pricing elasticity among its customers for different categories. Rural
food consumers, for instance, see butter and rice as a higher buying priority and
therefore these products are perhaps less price elastic than they would be for
urban shoppers. Urban consumers, meanwhile, tend to rank cereals and candy
higher among their priorities.
3. Placement and design optimization. Brick-and-mortar retailers can also gain
substantially by optimizing the placement of goods and visual designs (e.g., end
caps, shelves) by mining sales data at the SKU level—in essence, a more local
version of the kinds of optimization that take advantage of foot-traffic data. Online
retailers can adjust Web site placements based on data on page interaction
such as scrolling, clicks, and mouse-overs. For instance, eBay has conducted
thousands of experiments with different aspects of its Web site to determine
optimal layout and other features from navigation to the size of its photos.
Operations
1. Performance transparency. Retailers can now run daily analyses of
performance that they can aggregate and report by store sales, SKU sales, and
sales per employee. Today, these systems are moving ever closer to real time.
Retailers can look at cashiers for accuracy and transactions per hour and at the
quality of customer service based on the percentage of customer issues solved
with a single call, customer complaints, and satisfaction surveys. Although the
industry already widely uses performance reporting at a basic level, the trend
toward much higher frequency, immediacy, and granular reporting allows
managers to make concrete adjustments in their operations in a much more timely
manner, i.e., there is still headroom to gain value using this lever.
2. Labor inputs optimization. Another operational lever that can create value
through reducing costs while maintaining service levels is around the optimization
of labor inputs, automated time and attendance tracking, and improved labor
scheduling. This lever can create more accurate predictions of staffing needs,
especially during peak periods, so that overcapacity can be avoided. Because
store labor represents approximately 30 percent of the average retailer’s fixed
costs, employing this lever is well worthwhile.

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Supply chain
1. Inventory management. With the additional detail offered by advanced analytics
mining multiple datasets, big data can continue to improve retailers’ inventory
management, Best-in-class inventory management provides full transparency
at the SKU level, while bar code systems linked to automated replenishment
processes reduce the incidents of running out of stock. Leading retailers are
improving stock forecasting by combining multiple datasets such as sales
histories, weather predictions, and seasonal sales cycles. Together, improved
inventory management allows retailers to hold a lower level of stock because
supplies are coupled much more tightly with demand signals, while reducing the
number of sales lost because of merchandise stock-outs.
2. Distribution and logistics optimization. Leading retailers are also optimizing
transportation by using GPS-enabled big data telematics (i.e., remote reporting
of position, etc.) and route optimization to improve their fleet and distribution
management. Transport analytics can improve productivity by optimizing fuel
efficiency, preventive maintenance, driver behavior, and vehicle routing.
3. Informing supplier negotiations. In a big data world, leading retailers can
analyze customer preferences and buying behavior to inform their negotiations
with suppliers. They can use price and transaction data to focus negotiated
concessions on key products, for instance. Using big data in this arena is a
significant opportunity, given that the cost of goods sold makes up the largest
portion of cost for a retailer. However, we should note that suppliers also
recognize the importance of understanding customer preferences and are
actively gaining access to, and analyzing, data on consumer behavior to uncover
insights that strengthen their hand in negotiations with retailers.
New business models
The avalanche of data in the retail industry, coupled with other advances in business,
is enabling the emergence of innovative business models. These models are the
most intriguing and innovative—but also the most potentially threatening—to
traditional retailers. Two new business models with the most traction today are price
comparison services and Web-based markets.
1. Price comparison services. It is common today for third parties to offer real
time or near-real-time pricing and related price transparency on products across
multiple retailers. Consumers can instantly compare the price of a specific
product at multiple retail outlets. Where these comparisons are possible,
prices tend to be lower. Studies show that consumers are saving an average of
10 percent when they can shop using such services. Retailers need to carefully
think about how to respond to such price comparison services. Those that
can compete on price will want to ensure that they are the most visible on such
services. Retailers that cannot compete on price will need to determine how to
differentiate themselves from competitors in a price-transparent world, whether
it is in the quality of the shopping experience, differentiated products, or the
provision of other value-added services.


2. Web-based markets. Web-based marketplaces, such as those provided by
Amazon and eBay, provide searchable product listings from a large number of
vendors. In addition to price transparency, they offer access to a vast number
of niche retailers that otherwise do not have the marketing or sales horsepower
to reach consumers. They also provide a tremendous amount of useful product
information, including consumer-generated reviews that deliver further
transparency to consumers.
Since we have drawn from global best practices, the findings of this case study can
be applied to other countries and regions—with some qualifications. Developed
economies will find the levers we identified and resulting analyses to be directly
applicable. But the potential opportunities could be even larger in geographies that
have not yet begun to use big data as a growth engine. In regions such as Europe
where labor laws are relatively more rigid, the labor resource optimization levers may
yield less dramatic results.

BIG DATA CAN DELIVER HIGHER MARGINS AND PRODUCTIVITY
We have estimated the potential impact of each of the 16 big data levers we have
described, using a combination of our own case studies, academic and industry
research, and interviews with experts; for more on our methodology, see the
appendix. While we estimate the total potential value that big data can enable, we do
not predict what value the sector will actually capture because this largely depends
on actions taken by retailers to overcome a number of barriers, including obstacles
related to technology, talent, and culture, as well as external factors such as whether
consumers are receptive to having their behavior data mined and the ability of
suppliers to leverage some of the same levers in negotiations.
Marketing levers can affect 10 to 30 percent of operating margin; merchandising
levers can affect 10 to 40 percent; and supply chain levers can have a 5 to 35 percent
impact (Exhibit 23). In contrast, price transparency levers will tend to cut prices and
squeeze margins.
The total potential impact of individual big data levers varies significantly across retail
subsectors (Exhibit 24). Some subsectors will have already pulled big data levers
more than others, partly explaining this variation.

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Exhibit 23
Different levers have varied impacts on the operating margins of firms

Impact on operating margin
%
-30

-20

-10

0

10

20

30

40

50

Marketing
Merchandising
Operations
Supply chain
Price transparency
SOURCE: Expert interviews; publicly available data; McKinsey case studies; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

Exhibit 24
The big data value potential in retail varies
in different subsectors

New
business1

Supply chain

Operations

Merchandising

Marketing

General
Health and merpersonal
chandis
care stores e stores

Building
Food
material
and
and
Nonstore bevgarden retailers erage

Highest relevance
Lowest relevance
ElecClothing Sporting, tronics
and
hobby,
and
Furniture
accesbook,
appli- and home
sories
music
ances furnishings Other

Improved crossselling
Location-based
marketing
In-store behavior
analysis
Customer microsegmentation
Sentiment
analysis
Enhancing
multichannel
experience
Assortment
optimization
Pricing
optimization
Placement and
design
optimization
Performance
transparency
Labor inputs
optimization
Improved
inventory
management
Distribution and
logistics
optimization
Informing
supplier
negotiations
Price
comparison
services

1 Impact of Web-based markets is very difficult to quantify and this has not been included here.


While individual players can use big data levers to grow their top lines and operating
margins, these gains will largely shift value within the industry rather than increasing
its total size. Firms that are relatively better at deploying big data levers will experience
significant gains at the expense of those that do not execute as well. The overall
winners should be consumers, who will benefit from receiving goods better suited to
their needs.
We also estimated potential productivity gains at the industry level, opting to take
a conservative approach to such estimates by applying only the effects of levers in
operations and supply chains that reduce costs (see the appendix for detail on our
methodology). If we look solely at efficiency, we estimate that big data levers have
the potential to create an annual 0.5 percent acceleration in productivity through
2020. To put that in context, academic research has estimated that IT investments in
the entire US economy, including retail, through the high-growth 1990s added 1 to
2 percent to the compound annual growth rate of US productivity.64
This estimate does not take into account the fact that the use of big data will be
a boon to consumers through the economic surplus that they will capture and is
therefore conservative. For instance, even if retail consumers do not spend more
money overall, many of the marketing and merchandising levers we have described
will improve their shopping experience. Consumers will find better products to match
their needs (e.g., consumers that choose to opt-in to marketing programs that use big
data to better target offers) and spend less time looking for those products at the right
price (e.g., because they can obtain information about the availability of inventory
before visiting a store, or use price comparison services). This should increase the
real value added of the retail sector, even if estimating the value of this consumer
surplus is difficult.
We believe that the use of large datasets will continue to transform the face of retail. In
recent decades, IT and data that was used to optimize supply chains helped create
the category of big-box retailers that sell large volumes of a wide range of products
at low prices. In recent years, online retailers such as Amazon, eBay, and Groupon
are redefining what retail can mean. Instead of receiving information about goods
and services from sales teams or advertisements, consumers find the information
they need from their fellow shoppers and find what they want to buy via electronic
marketplaces.

THE INDUSTRY AND POLICY MAKERS NEED TO OVERCOME
BARRIERS TO TAP THE FULL OPPORTUNITY OF BIG DATA
If the retail industry is to realize the potential value from the use of big data, both the
industry and government will have to deal with a number of important barriers. Policy
makers will make choices about how to regulate the industry’s use of information
about consumers—policy choices that will have profound implications for many other
industries that, in common with retail, will draw increasingly pronounced concerns
about privacy and security in the era of big data. It is certainly the case that consumer
attitudes toward the use of their personal information, especially personal location
data and electronic data generated by their use of the Internet, are changing rapidly.
But many people remain uninformed about how, where, and to what extent this
information is used in targeted advertising and other marketing strategies.

64 Stephen Oliner and Daniel Sichel, “Information technology and productivity: Where we are now
and where we are going?”, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Economic Review, 2002.

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Across the globe, we observe the emergence of different concepts of electronic
privacy. Germany, for instance, has limited the use of the Street View function
of Google maps. Depending on the jurisdiction and purpose, there are different
definitions of personally identifiable information (PII)—what counts legally as
information that identifies a person for a variety of purposes. Some definitions are
more general than others, and large players would benefit from having a single
country or industry standard.
For their part, retail executives must manage and overcome multiple barriers to
realize the full potential of big data. The first is the mind-set of employees and firms;
many people still view IT as a back-office function and therefore as a large cost
center rather than as an engine for business growth. In contrast, leading companies
in their use of big data understand that their IT initiatives will be a crucial source of
competitive advantage. These companies must make sure that business and IT
leaders collaborate closely so that the use of big data underpins improvements in
efficiency improvement and opportunities for creating value. Companies should also
actively seek out and implement big-data-based innovations that will give them longterm competitive advantages.
Another common obstacle for big data leaders is their legacy IT systems. Many of
these systems were installed decades ago, well before today’s big data opportunities
were considered or even possible. These legacy systems usually include multiple
silos of information generated in incompatible standards and formats so that
they cannot be readily integrated, accessed, and analyzed. Attempts to upgrade
and integrate these systems can be so difficult and plagued with the potential for
introducing new system bugs that one retail expert complained that such an effort
was “much worse than starting from scratch.”
Even deploying new IT-enabled systems can present tremendous challenges.
The gap between the predicted scale of adoption of RFID systems and their actual
deployment tells a cautionary tale. RFID held the promise of providing a source of
supply chain data that could be exploited using big data techniques. In the early days,
RFID reader reliability was far worse than originally expected, necessitating manual
inputs to correct for reader errors. This destroyed the productivity gains expected
from deploying this technology. Adoption slowed, RFID tags were in lower demand,
and per-tag costs did not decline as quickly as anticipated, as economies of scale
were muted. Higher tag prices hurt the business case for further RFID deployment,
reinforcing a negative cycle in which the application of big data levers based on this
technology has been delayed.
Potentially as daunting for retail executives is the task of finding the talent that can
execute big data levers. Globally, executives complain about the scarcity of highquality candidates for these jobs, and many retailers do not have sufficient talent
in-house. Moreover, existing analytical and technical talent tends to be managed
inefficiently, isolated in particular departments, or scattered in different business
units. People with the requisite skills are rarely directly involved in strategic decision
making and have little impact beyond answering highly specific questions. Retailers
with the foresight and intelligence to hire big data talent in sufficient numbers and
then involve these hires in strategic decisions and planning will take the fullest
advantage of value-creation opportunities at the expense of their less nimble
competitors.


  
In an environment in which retailers face significant pressures from slow GDP growth
in conjunction with pricing pressures from suppliers upstream and consumers
downstream, retailers need to compete fiercely to ensure their survival and relevance.
While information technology and data have already delivered waves of impact, our
research finds that there is significant headroom arising out of innovation that retailers
can tap. Retailers that develop and exercise their big data muscles will boost their
chances of outcompeting and winning at the expense of those who do not grasp this
opportunity in the years ahead.

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3d. Manufacturing (global)
The manufacturing sector was an early and intensive user of data to drive quality and
efficiency, adopting information technology and automation to design, build, and
distribute products since the dawn of the computer era. In the 1990s, manufacturing
companies racked up impressive annual productivity gains because of both operational
improvements that increased the efficiency of their manufacturing processes
and improvements in the quality of products they manufactured. For example,
advanced manufactured products such as computers became much more powerful.
Manufacturers also optimized their global footprints by placing sites in, or outsourcing
production to, low-cost regions. But despite such advances, manufacturing, arguably
more than most other sectors, faces the challenge of generating significant productivity
improvement in industries that have already become relatively efficient. We believe that
big data can underpin another substantial wave of gains.65
These gains will come from improved efficiency in design and production, further
improvements in product quality, and better meeting customer needs through more
precisely targeted products and effective promotion and distribution. For example, big
data can help manufacturers reduce product development time by 20 to 50 percent
and eliminate defects prior to production through simulation and testing. Using realtime data, companies can also manage demand planning across extended enterprises
and global supply chains, while reducing defects and rework within production
plants. Overall, big data provides a means to achieve dramatic improvements in the
management of the complex, global, extended value chains that are becoming prevalent
in manufacturing and to meet customers’ needs in innovative and more precise ways,
such as through collaborative product development based on customer data.
We base these conclusions on an examination of multiple manufacturing subsectors
encompassing both discrete and process manufacturing, from basic manufacturing
subsectors such as consumer goods and food, to advanced manufacturing
subsectors such as automotive and aerospace. We drew upon global best practice
examples of the use of big data to identify seven levers of value creation, describe the
range of potential impact, and the barriers that have to be overcome to capture that
value.66

MANUFACTURING HAS HISTORICALLY BEEN A PRODUCTIVITY
LEADER, AND BIG DATA CAN HELP EXTEND GAINS
The manufacturing sector has been the backbone of many developed economies
and remains an important driver of GDP and employment there. However, with
the rise of production capacity and capability in China and other low-cost nations,
manufacturing has become an increasingly global activity, featuring extended supply
chains made possible by advances in information and communications technology.
While globalization is not a recent phenomenon, the explosion in information and
communication technology, along with reduced international freight costs and
lower entry barriers to markets worldwide, has hugely accelerated the industrial

65 Manufacturing is a sector with multiple issues that advanced economies need to address,
many of which do not involve big data. In this research, we focus on the role that big data can
play.
66 Our analysis focuses primarily on the core production processes of a manufacturer—i.e.,
RD, supply chain, and manufacturing processes—and less on adjacent processes such as
marketing and sales.


development path and created increasingly complex webs of value chains spanning
the world.67
Increasingly global and fragmented manufacturing value chains create new
challenges that manufacturers must overcome to sustain productivity growth. In
many cases, technological change and globalization have allowed countries to
specialize in specific stages of the production process. As a result, manufacturers
have assembled global production and supply chain networks to achieve cost
advantages. For example, a typical global consumer electronics manufacturer
has production facilities on almost every continent, weighing logistics costs
against manufacturing costs to optimize the footprint of their facilities. Advanced
manufacturers also often have a large number of suppliers, specialized in producing
specific types of components where they have sustainable advantages both in cost
and quality. It is typical for a large automobile original equipment manufacturer (OEM)
assembly plant to be supplied by up to 4,000 outside vendors.
To continue achieving high levels of productivity growth, manufacturers will need
to leverage large datasets to drive efficiency across the extended enterprise and to
design and market higher-quality products. The “raw material” is readily available;
manufacturers already have a significant amount of digital data with which to work.
Manufacturing stores more data than any other sector—close to 2 exabytes of new
data stored in 2010. This sector generates data from a multitude of sources, from
instrumented production machinery (process control), to supply chain management
systems, to systems that monitor the performance of products that have already
been sold (e.g., during a single cross-country flight, a Boeing 737 generates
240 terabytes of data).
And the amount of data generated will continue to grow exponentially. The number
of RFID tags sold globally is projected to rise from 12 million in 2011 to 209 billion in
2021. IT systems installed along the value chain to monitor the extended enterprise
are creating additional stores of increasingly complex data, which currently tends
to reside only in the IT system where it is generated. Manufacturers will also begin to
combine data from different systems including, for example, computer-aided design,
computer-aided engineering, computer-aided manufacturing, collaborative product
development management, and digital manufacturing, and across organizational
boundaries in, for instance, end-to-end supply chain data.

MANUFACTURERS CAN USE BIG DATA ACROSS THE VALUE CHAIN
Big data has the potential to enable seven performance improvement levers for
manufacturers, affecting the entire value chain (Exhibit 25). In this section, we will
discuss each of these in turn.
Research and development and product design
The use of big data offers further opportunities to accelerate product development,
help designers home in on the most important and valuable features based on
concrete customer inputs as well as designs that minimize production costs, and
harness consumer insights to reduce development costs through approaches
including open innovation.

67 While the transition to a post-industrial economy took about 200 years in the United Kingdom
and about 130 years in Germany, South Korea took about 60 years. See Eberhard Abele,
Tobias Meyer, Ulrich Näher, Gernot Strube, and Richard Sykes, eds., Global production: A
handbook for strategy and implementation (Berlin: Springer, 2008).

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Exhibit 25
We have identified the following big data levers across
the manufacturing value chain
RD and
design

Supplychain
mgmt

MarketProducing and
tion
sales

Aftersales
service

1 Build consistent interoperable, cross-functional RD
and product design databases along supply chain to
enable concurrent engineering, rapid experimentation
and simulation, and co-creation
2 Aggregate customer data and make them widely
available to improve service level, capture cross- and
up-selling opportunities, and enable design-to-value
3 Source and share data through virtual collaboration sites
(idea marketplaces to enable crowd sourcing)
4 Implement advanced demand forecasting and supply
planning across suppliers and using external variables
5 Implement lean manufacturing and model production
virtually (digital factory) to create process transparency,
develop dashboards, and visualize bottlenecks
6 Implement sensor data-driven operations analytics to
improve throughput and enable mass customization
7 Collect after-sales data from sensors and feed back in
real time to trigger after-sales services and detect
manufacturing or design flaws

1. Product lifecycle management. Over decades, manufacturing companies
have implemented IT systems to manage the product lifecycle including
computer aided-design, engineering, manufacturing, and product development
management tools, and digital manufacturing. However, the large datasets
generated by these systems have tended to remain trapped within their respective
systems. Manufacturers could capture a significant big data opportunity to create
more value by instituting product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms that
can integrate datasets from multiple systems to enable effective and consistent
collaboration. For example, PLM could provide a platform for “co-creation,”
e.g., bringing together internal and external inputs to create new products.
This is particularly useful in fields such as aerospace where a new product
might be assembled with hundreds of thousands of components supplied by
hundreds of suppliers from around the world. In this context, having the OEM
co-create designs with suppliers can be extraordinarily valuable. PLM platforms
can also significantly enable experimentation at the design stage. Designers
and manufacturing engineers can share data and quickly and cheaply create
simulations to test different designs, the choice of parts and suppliers, and the
associated manufacturing costs. This is especially useful because decisions
made in the design stage typically drive 80 percent of manufacturing costs.

Leading players in advanced industries are already embracing the collaborative
use of data and controlled experimentation. Toyota, Fiat, and Nissan have all
cut new-model development time by 30 to 50 percent; Toyota claims to have
eliminated 80 percent of defects prior to building the first physical prototype.68
However, while the payoff for this opportunity is large, manufacturers will likely
need to invest significantly upgrade their systems, which in many cases are
decades old. In addition to the technical work of integrating datasets from

68 Note that in addition to reducing development time, manufacturers, as a result of using
integrated PLM, are able to improve quality and reduce resources in order to develop more
derivatives or product extensions.


different IT systems, manufacturers will need to ensure that staff members from
different functions (RD, production) and organizations (OEMs, suppliers) use
these tools to collaborate. Today, a lack of collaboration across silos is closer to
the norm.
2. Design to value. While obtaining customer input through market research has
traditionally been a part of the product design process, many manufacturers have
yet to systematically extract crucial insights from the increasing volume of customer
data to refine existing designs and help develop specifications for new models and
variants. Best-in-class manufacturers conduct conjoint analyses to determine
how much customers are willing to pay for certain features and to understand
which features are most important for success in the market.69 These companies
supplement such efforts with additional quantitative customer insights mined from
sources such as point-of-sales data and customer feedback. New sources of data
that manufacturers are starting to mine include customer comments in social
media and sensor data that describe actual product usage.

However, gaining access to comprehensive data about customers in order
to achieve holistic insights can be a significant barrier for manufacturers;
distributors, retailers, and other players can be unwilling to share such data,
considering them to be a competitive asset. Nevertheless, the size of the prize for
successfully designing to value can be substantial, especially in subsectors with
high product differentiation and changing customer preferences. For example,
one manufacturer of telecom equipment used customer insights data to improve
gross margin by 30 percent in 24 months, eliminating unnecessary costly
features and adding those that had higher value to the customer and for which the
customer was willing to pay a higher price.

3. Open innovation. To drive innovation and develop products that address
emerging customer needs, manufacturers are relying increasingly on outside
inputs through innovative channels. With the advent of Web 2.0, some
manufacturers are inviting external stakeholders to submit ideas for innovations
or even collaborate on product development via Web-based platforms.
Consumer goods companies such as Kraft and Procter and Gamble invite ideas
from their consumers as well as collaborate with external experts, including
academics and industry researchers, to develop new products. In the early
2000s, PG faced a problem of rising RD costs but a declining payoff. In
response, the company created the Connect and Develop open innovation
program, one element of which was leveraging InnoCentive, a Web-based
platform that invites experts to solve technical challenges that PG is facing.
Today, half of new products have elements that originated outside the company,
up from 15 percent in 2000. RD productivity at PG is up 60 percent, and RD
as a share of revenue has fallen from 4.8 to 3.4 percent. But as successful as
these open innovation initiatives can be, one key problem is how to extract, in an
efficient way, the truly valuable ideas from the potentially large number of inputs
these programs can generate. This is a task that big data techniques such as
automated algorithms can help to solve.

Open innovation through big data has been extended to advanced industries
as well. BMW, for example, has created an “idea management system” to help
evaluate ideas submitted through its “virtual innovation agency.” This has cut the

69 Conjoint analysis is a statistical technique that involves providing a controlled set of potential
products and services to elicit end users’ preferences through which an implicit valuation of
individual elements that make up the product or service can be determined.

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time taken to identify high-potential ideas by 50 percent and has also reduced
the time it takes to make a decision about how feasible an idea is. The result
has been that the company has incorporated two or three major ideas from its
open innovation effort into its models every year. An additional benefit of these
open innovation techniques is that they create more brand engagement from
participants in these efforts, as well as a positive “halo” effect as these initiatives
become more widely recognized.
Supply chain
Manufacturers, especially those producing fast-moving consumer goods, have
significant additional opportunities to improve demand forecasting and supply chain
planning. The volatility of demand has been a critical issue for manufacturers. Their
retailing customers have pushed hard for increased flexibility and responsiveness
from suppliers, given the diverging and ever-changing preferences of consumers.
Other trends, such as the increasing use of promotions and tactical pricing, have only
magnified volatility issues facing suppliers.
Manufacturers can improve their demand forecasting and supply planning by the
improved use of their own data. But as we’ve seen in other domains, far more value
can be unlocked when companies are able to integrate data from other sources
including data from retailers, such as promotion data (e.g., items, prices, sales),
launch data (e.g., specific items to be listed/delisted, ramp-up/ramp-down plans),
and inventory data (e.g., stock levels per warehouse, sales per store). By taking into
account data from across the value chain (potentially through collaborative supply
chain management and planning), manufacturers can smooth spiky order patterns.
The benefits of doing so will ripple through the value chain, helping manufacturers
to use cash more effectively and to deliver a higher level of service. Best-in-class
manufacturers are also accelerating the frequency of planning cycles to synchronize
them with production cycles. Indeed, some manufacturers are using near-real-time
data to adjust production. Others are collaborating with retailers to shape demand at
the store level with time-based discounts.
Production
Big data are driving additional efficiency in the production process with the
application of simulation techniques to the already large volume of data that
production generates. The increasing deployment of the “Internet of Things” is also
allowing manufacturers to use real-time data from sensors to track parts, monitor
machinery, and guide actual operations.70
1. Digital factory. Taking inputs from product development and historical
production data (e.g., order data, machine performance), manufacturers can
apply advanced computational methods to create a digital model of the entire
manufacturing process. Such a “digital factory”—including all machinery, labor,
and fixtures—can be used to design and simulate the most efficient production
system, from layout to sequencing of steps, for a specific product. Leading
automobile manufacturers have used this technique to optimize the production
layout of new plants, particularly when there are myriad constraints such as
space and utility distribution. A steel manufacturer used simulation to model its
entire portfolio of factories and quickly test improvement levers; this led to an

70 “Internet of Things” refers to sensors and actuators within networks of physical objects. For
more information, see Michael Chui, Markus Löffler, and Roger Roberts, “The Internet of
Things,” McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010.


improvement in delivery reliability of 20 to 30 percentage points. Case studies in
automotive, aerospace and defense, and semiconductors show that these types
of advanced simulations can reduce the number of production-drawing changes
as well as the cost of tool design and construction.71 Plants designed with these
techniques also have realized substantial reductions in assembly hours, cost
savings, and even improved delivery reliability.
2. Sensor-driven operations. The proliferation of Internet of Things applications
allows manufacturers to optimize operations by embedding real-time, highly
granular data from networked sensors in the supply chain and production
processes. These data allows ubiquitous process control and optimization
to reduce waste and maximize yield or throughput. They even allow for
innovations in manufacturing that have not been possible thus far, including nano
manufacturing.72

Some of the best examples of using big data from sensor networks come from
process manufacturing such as oil refining. For decades, the oil industry has used
huge amounts of real-time data to develop ever more hard-to-reach deposits.
Now, the industry has extended its use of big data to the production side to the
automated, remotely monitored oil field. The benefit of this approach is that it cuts
operations and maintenance costs that can account for 60 percent of wasted
expenses. In the digital oil field, a single system captures data from well-head
flow monitors, seismic sensors, and satellite telemetry systems. The data are
transmitted to very large data farms and then relayed to a real-time operations
center that monitors and adjusts parameters to optimize production and minimize
downtime. Experience suggests that the digital oil field can cut operational costs by
10 to 25 percent even while potentially boosting production by 5 percent or more.

Marketing and sales/after-sales support
As we have described, manufacturing companies are using data from customer
interactions not only to improve marketing and sales but also to inform product
development decisions. Increasingly, it is economically feasible to embed sensors
in products that can “phone home,” generating data about actual product usage
and performance. Manufacturers can now obtain real-time input on emerging
defects and adjust the production process immediately. RD operations can
share these data for redesign and new product development. Many construction
equipment manufacturers already embed sensors in their products, and this can
provide granular real-time data about utilization and usage patterns, enabling
these manufacturers to improve demand forecasts as well as their future product
development.
There are also many opportunities to leverage large datasets in the marketing, sales,
and after-sales service activities. As we can observe in many sectors, opportunities
range from the segmentation of customers to applying analytics in order to
improve the effectiveness of sales forces. An increasingly important application for
manufacturers is using sensor data from products once they are in use to improve
service offerings. For example, analyzing the data reported by sensors embedded
in complex products enables manufacturers of aircraft, elevators, and data-center
servers to create proactive smart preventive maintenance service packages. A repair

71 See for example, U. Bracht and T. Masurat, “The Digital Factory between vision and reality,”
Computers in Industry 56(4), May 2005.
72 An example is nano-scale printing in semiconductors.

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technician can be dispatched before the customer even realizes that a component
is likely to fail. Other manufacturers have been able to transform the commercial
relationship with customers from one in which they sell a product to one in which they
sell a service. An example is jet engine manufacturers selling “power-by-the-hour.”

BIG DATA IN AGGREGATE UNDERPINS SUBSTANTIAL
PRODUCTIVITY POTENTIAL AND INNOVATION
For manufacturers, opportunities enabled by big data can drive productivity gains
both through improving efficiency and the quality of products (Exhibit 26).73 Efficiency
gains arise across the value chain, from reducing unnecessary iterations in product
development cycles to optimizing the assembly process. The real output value of
products is increased by improving their quality and making products that better
match customers’ needs.
Exhibit 26
Big data levers can deliver value along the manufacturing value chain
in terms of cost, revenue, and working capital
Impact
Lever examples

▪ Concurrent
RD and
design

Cost

▪
▪

Production

After-sales
services

▪ Demand forecasting/

+2–3% profit
margin

▪ Sensor data-driven

Supply chain
management

Working
capital

+20–50% PD2 costs -20-50% time
to market
+30% gross margin
2
-25% PD costs

engineering/PLM1
Design-to-value
Crowd sourcing

-10–25%
operating costs
-10–50%
assembly costs

Revenue

shaping and supply
planning

▪

operations analytics
Digital Factory for
lean manufacturing

▪ Product sensor data
analysis for aftersales service

-10–40%
maintenance
costs

Subsector applicability
High – Low complexity
High – Low complexity
B2C – B2B

-3–7%
onetime

FMCG3 – Capital goods

Up to +7% revenue

Capital intense – CPG3

+2% revenue


+10% annual
production


1 Product lifecycle management.
2 Product development.
3 Fast-moving consumer goods and consumer packaged goods.
SOURCE: Expert interviews; press and literature search; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

Beyond pushing productivity, big data enables innovative services and even new
business models in manufacturing. Sensor data have made possible innovative aftersales services. For example, BMW’s ConnectedDrive offers drivers directions based
on real-time traffic information, automatically calling for help when sensors indicate
trouble, alerts drivers of maintenance needs based on the actual condition of the
car, and feeds operation data directly to service centers. The ability to track the use
of products at a micro-level has also made possible monetization models that are
based not on the purchase of a product but on services priced by their usage, as we
have described. The ability to exchange data across the extended enterprise has also
enabled production to be unbundled radically into highly distributed networks. For
example, Li and Fung, a supplier to apparel retailers, orchestrates a network of more
than 7,500 suppliers, each of which focuses on delivering a very specific part of the
supply chain.

73 Gains will likely show up in both labor productivity and resource productivity.


Some of the most powerful impacts of big data apply across entire manufacturing
ecosystems. As we have documented, big data plays a pivotal role in ensuring that
these ecosystem webs function well and continue to evolve. Indeed, new data
intermediaries or data businesses could begin to emerge. They could, for example,
capitalize on the economic value of data that describes the flow of goods around the
world.

MANUFACTURERS MUST TACKLE ORGANIZATIONAL,
CULTURAL, AND TALENT CHALLENGES TO MAXIMIZE THE
BENEFITS OF BIG DATA
Much of the value that big data can create in manufacturing requires the access
and varied use of data from multiple sources across an extended enterprise. So
to fulfill the potential for value creation in this sector will require manufacturing
companies to invest in IT as well as to make organizational changes. The additional
IT investment necessary may not be insignificant. Some of the big data levers that
we have discussed, including updating a PLM platform that can link across various
IT systems, will be costly. Nevertheless, the long-term payoff should outweigh the
cost. Other investments will be required to develop interfaces and protocols to share
data effectively across the extended enterprise. The standardization of interfaces
will be critical and may require industry-wide partnerships to achieve. Strongly
departmentalized companies, with multiple IT systems and overlapping and/or
redundant data in different operations and divisions, are clearly at a disadvantage. To
obtain the benefits of design-to-value, for instance, a company needs to have a free
interchange of data among marketing and sales, RD, and production. So, in many
organizations, achieving success will require strong leadership and a cultural shift to
establish the mind-sets and behaviors to breech today’s silos. Many organizations
will need to undertake organizational change programs to enforce the necessary
shift—groups that have never shared their data will not start to do so simply because
the IT systems are in place.
Many of the levers also require access to data from different players in the value
chain. To optimize production planning, data from various tiers of suppliers will be
necessary. Demand planning will require customer data from retailers. To access
such pools of data, manufacturers will need to be thoughtful about establishing the
right value propositions and incentives. Many retailers, for instance, guard customer
data as proprietary, but there have been instances of successful data sharing. A
notable example is the vendor-managed inventory model between some large
retailers and consumer packaged goods companies, pioneered on a significant scale
by Wal-Mart, as we discussed in our retail case study.
Manufacturing companies will also need to build the capabilities needed to manage
big data. Despite the fact that the sector has been dealing with large datasets for
two decades, the rising volume of data from new sources along the supply chain and
from end markets requires a new level of storage and computing power and deep
analytical expertise if manufacturers are to harvest relevant information and insights.
There is a shortage of talent with the right experience for managing this level of
complexity. Manufacturers will need not only to recruit new talent but also to remove
organizational obstacles that today prevent such individuals from making maximum
contributions. For example, we know of oil refineries that still rely on a manager with
spreadsheets to plan equipment maintenance and upgrades—work that can be
accomplished more effectively with algorithms using data collected directly from
machinery.

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Finally, where big data applications touch consumers and other end users, there
are privacy issues. One of the most promising ideas is using product sensor data to
create finely targeted after-sales services or cross-selling. But wielding this lever will
be possible only if consumers don’t object to suppliers monitoring how they use their
products. Manufacturers must therefore address privacy concerns proactively, in
collaboration with policy makers, and communicate with end users about choices
and data transparency.
  
Manufacturers have tremendous potential to generate value from the use of large
datasets, integrating data across the extended enterprise and applying advanced
analytical techniques to raise their productivity both by increasing efficiency and
improving the quality of their products. In emerging markets, manufacturers can
begin to build competitive advantage that goes beyond their (thus far) relatively low
labor costs. In developed markets, manufacturers can use big data to reduce costs
and deliver greater innovation in products and services.


3e. Personal location data (global)
We are witnessing an explosion in the amount of information available about where
people are in the world. Technologies such as GPS allow us to quickly locate a device as
small as a mobile phone within a few dozen meters, and we are seeing personal location
data being used to create a wave of new businesses and innovative business models
that are touching the lives of people around the globe. This revolution will continue
over the next decade and beyond with opportunities unfolding that we cannot even
imagine. The quality, accessibility, and volume of personal location data will improve and
expand, reaching into many business sectors and creating transformational financial
opportunities well beyond those that we are witnessing today.
Unlike the other domains that we have examined, new pools of personal location data
are not confined to a single sector but rather cut across many industries, including
telecom, retail, and media. This domain offers the potential for huge new value
creation over the next ten years that we estimate at more than $100 billion in revenue
to service providers and as much as $700 billion in value to consumer and business
end users. Capturing this value will require the right enablers, including sufficient
investment in technology, infrastructure, and personnel as well as appropriate
government action.

PERSONAL LOCATION DATA VOLUMES HAVE INCREASED
RAPIDLY WITH GROWTH IN THE ADOPTION OF MOBILE PHONES
In this analysis, we examined personal location data that pinpoint accurately—within
a few city blocks—where a person (or a device) is in real time, usually expressed in
digital code that maps an individual’s location on a grid stretched across the earth’s
surface (see Box 10, “How did we define the scope of personal location data?”).
An early source of personal location data was individuals’ credit and debit card
payments, linked to personal identification data from cards swiped at point-ofsale (POS) terminals typically in fixed locations. A similar connection was possible
using transactions made at automated teller machines. Globally in 2008, there
were 90 billion to 100 billion such transactions off line linkable to POS devices. Law
enforcement investigations regularly use such data to establish physical location.
As the number of people using mobile phones has increased, the use of cell-tower
signals to triangulate the location of such devices has become increasingly common.
This technology has the potential to identify the location of the owners of almost
5 billion globally. The penetration of smartphones is increasing, too. In 2010, about
600 million devices were already in use, and their number is projected to grow at
about 20 percent per year. Smartphones are enabled with GPS, a technology that
triangulates location within about 15 meters using a constellation of orbiting satellites.
Many smartphones also have Wi-Fi networking capability, an additional source of
data to determine location. Services such as Skyhook have mapped the physical
location of various Wi-Fi networks that broadcast their identity (service set identifier,
or SSID) and therefore allow a mobile device to correlate the Wi-Fi networks it detects
with a physical location. These smartphone technologies are making personal
location data more accurate and far more readily available, particularly to developers
of mobile device applications.
In addition, new technologies are being developed that determine personal location
within buildings where GPS signals are notoriously weak. Shopkick is a mobile
phone application that allows merchants to track their customers from the moment
they walk into a store by picking up inaudible sounds emitted by in-store devices on

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the mobile phone’s microphone. Another example of such innovation is UK-based
company Path Intelligence, which can track foot traffic within malls or amusement
parks by passively monitoring identification signals sent by individual mobile phones.

Box 10. How did we define the scope of personal location data?
For the purposes of this analysis, we include technologies that locate an individual
within a few intersections (i.e., within a couple of city blocks in an urban setting
and perhaps beyond those parameters in less densely populated areas) and
increasingly with even finer precision. Today, there are three primary sources of
these data: GPS chips in mobile devices such as phones and personal navigation
systems; cell-tower triangulation data on mobile devices; and in-person card
payment data linked to a POS terminal. We do not include data derived from
Internet Protocol addresses because the margin of error varies widely according
to whether the device to which the IP address is attached is mobile, and to the
density and topology of the underlying IP network. In addition, our analysis
leaves out data about the relative distances between locations without absolute
coordinates, such as data derived from watches that track running distances and
various motion sensors.
We have also excluded location data about non-human objects such as
packages being tracked as inventory,or shipping containers that have been
tagged with GPS sensors. Tracking the location of objects can enable a
tremendous amount of economic value. For example, the global location of highvalue and/or perishable goods while in shipment, e.g., pharmaceuticals or hightech components, is data of great value to both the suppliers and customers of
these products. Some logistics companies are already offering the capability to
provide these data to their customers, combining location with other data from
sensors on-board the packages carrying these goods, e.g., the temperature
or physical shocks they have endured while in transit. Some of the benefits of
tracking the location of objects have already been evident in our research on retail
and manufacturing. For this case study, we studied applications of location data
about individuals in order to focus on a set of new and emerging applications, and
to constrain our research to a manageable scope.

A combination of navigation devices, cell-tower tracking, and smartphones accounts
for the majority of personal location data today. Navigation devices are a major source
of data volume because they update their locations so frequently. Cell towers generate
a high volume of personal location data simply because there are so many cell phone
users worldwide. And smartphones are a huge and fast-growing source of these data
because the majority of users use applications that require their locations to be tracked.
Our research estimates that the global pool of generated personal location data was
at least 1 petabyte in 2009 and that this pool is growing by about 20 percent a year
(Exhibit 27).74 (Note that we do not include the potential amount of data from celltower triangulation.)75 Explosive growth in the use of GPS-enabled smartphones is

74 A petabyte is the equivalent of about 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets full of text.
75 We did not include location data inferred from cell-tower triangulation because the locations
are relatively imprecise. Including those data would have increased our estimate of the size of
personal location data 400-fold, given that the nearest cell-tower signals are determined every
seven seconds.


87

the major driver of this expansion.76 Compared with other sectors, such as health
care, that measure the size of total data in exabytes (1 exabyte is 1,000 times a PB),
the total size of pure personal location data is relatively small because the amount of
data required to capture a single location fix is only a few bytes while each image or
video is sized in megabytes. However, the relatively small amount of data generated
by the personal location domain suggests that this type of data potentially offer a
much higher value per byte generated, as we will discuss.
Exhibit 27
Overall personal location data total more than 1 petabyte per year globally
Personal location data generated globally, 2009
Terabytes

400–2,500

600

Navigation
devices

20

1– 2

NavigaPeople
tion apps track/
on phones locator

1

Locationenabled
search

1–5

5–20

0

Geotargeted
ads

Shopper
tracking

1–2

1,000–
3,000+

1

Emergency
Misc.
location- call
location1
based
services,
e.g., games

Smart
phone
opt-in
tracking

In-person Total
card
payment

1 Modern emergency call services, such as North American Enhanced 911, report location when an emergency call is made.
SOURCE: Press search; expert interviews; Strategy Analytics; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

Asia is the leading region for the generation of personal location data simply because
so many mobile phones are in use there. For instance, China has more mobile
phones in use than in any other country at an estimated 800 million devices in 2010.
India ranks second in this regard with more than 650 million mobile phones in use,
dwarfing the North America in third place with its 300 million cell phones in 2010.
Growth in the use of mobile telephony is set to grow rapidly in developing markets,
particularly the use of advanced devices, is set to grow rapidly in developing
markets.77 In China, for instance, we expect the number of basic phones to shrink at a
rate of 13 percent per year between 2010 and 2015, but the use of devices with smart
features to increase by an estimated 5 percent annually during this period, and that of
advanced phones by a stunning 33 percent. We anticipate broadly similar trends to
unfold in India (Exhibit 28).

76 Location data generated by smartphones and their applications are growing at double the
average rate of growth for all location data (which also includes for example navigation
devices) because of the rapid growth of smartphone adoption.
77 Yankee Group divides mobile phones into three categories: basic phones, smart features, and
advanced operating system (OS). Advanced operating system (OS) maps most closely to the
meaning of smartphones used in the media today. See Global mobile forecast, Yankee Group,
December 2010.

88

Exhibit 28
There is a significant number of mobile phone
users in emerging markets, and advanced phones
will drive growth
Mobile phone installed base, 2010
Millions

Basic
Smart feature
Advanced operating system (OS)
Compound annual growth rate
2010–15, %
Basic

209

China

481

198

Europe

746

76

517
465

40

North America 1

260

180
87 680

40 544

45 307

1,036

33

10

31

-4

7

-12

83 813

5

-3

48 678

533

110

Middle East,
North Africa

Smart feature Advanced

-13

61 49 110

Rest of Asia

Latin America

67 800

-34

149

India
Japan

524

3

17

-12

-4

16

-23

3

22

-19

1

21

-54

-8

29

SOURCE: Yankee Group; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

THERE ARE THREE MAIN CATEGORIES OF APPLICATIONS USING
PERSONAL LOCATION DATA
We have identified three major categories of applications of personal location data.
Location-based applications and services for individuals is a category that includes
smart routing, automotive telematics, and mobile-phone based location services.
The second category is the organizational use of individual personal location data
that includes geo-targeted advertising, electronic toll collection, insurance pricing,
and emergency response. Third is the macro-level use of aggregate location data that
includes urban planning and retail business intelligence.
In this section, we will describe several examples of each type of application.
However, this is such a dynamic field with such a high degree of change and
innovation that our examples should not be regarded as exhaustive.
Location-based applications and services for individuals
1. Smart routing. Smart routing based on real-time traffic information is one of the
most heavily used applications of personal location data.78 The more advanced
navigation systems can receive information about traffic in real time, including
accidents, scheduled roadwork, and congested areas. These systems are also
capable of giving users up-to-date information on points of interest and impending
weather conditions. Some of these devices can not only provide drivers with
recommendations on which routes to take to avoid congestion but also report back
information on location and movement to a central server, allowing congestion to be
measured even more accurately.

78 We regard navigation using real-time traffic data as a big data application because it requires
the analysis of a large pool of data about current traffic congestion. “Traditional” navigation
systems that do not use real-time traffic data are still quite common and can provide
considerable benefit. For example, a proprietary NAVTEQ research project conducted in
Germany has shown that drivers using navigation devices drive shorter distances and spend
less time driving (including improving fuel efficiency by 12 percent).


As the penetration of smartphones increases, and free navigation applications
are included in these devices, the use of smart routing is likely to grow. By 2020,
more than 70 percent of mobile phones are expected to have GPS capability, up
from 20 percent in 2010. In addition, the number of automobiles equipped with
dashboard GPS devices will continue to grow.

All told, we estimate the potential global value of smart routing in the form of time
and fuel savings will be about $500 billion by 2020. This is the equivalent of saving
drivers 20 billion hours on the road, or 10 to 15 hours every year for each traveler,
and about $150 billion on fuel consumption. These savings translate into an
estimated reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 380 million tonnes, or more
than 5 percent a year.79 These estimates assume adequate investment in the
two main areas of developing digital maps and the availability of real-time traffic
information. Digital map data are available today in most developed countries and
are becoming increasingly commonplace in developing countries. For smart routing
to be effective, these maps will have to be kept up to date, a particular challenge in
emerging markets where road networks and infrastructure are constantly changing.
Moreover, for the full capture of this potential value, growth in demand will be
necessary to spur the required investment in technology infrastructure, including
hardware and transmission towers that are necessary to enable access to real-time
traffic information.

2. Automotive telematics. Over coming years, an increasing number of
automobiles will be equipped with GPS and telematics (i.e., the ability to send
and receive data) that can enable a range of personal safety and monitoring
services. One example already on the market is General Motors’ OnStar service,
which transmits real-time vehicle location and diagnostic information to a central
monitoring site. Systems such as this—which are analogous to remote health
monitoring in the health care system—can alert drivers to when they need repairs
or software upgrades, or can locate vehicles during emergencies (e.g., when air
bags have been deployed or a vehicle has been reported as stolen).
3. Mobile phone location-based services. There is also a fast-developing and
broadening range of other location-based services (LBS) provided on mobile
phones. These services include safety-related applications for tracking children
and other family members, or finding friends. Examples already in place today
include Foursquare (more than 8 million users as of April 2011) and Loopt (more
than 5 million users in April 2011). Loopt, founded in 2006 in Mountain View,
California, is a downloadable application for smartphones that allows users to
share real-time location information, status messages, and geo-tagged photos
with a community of friends. Detailed maps that are available on all major US
networks and from several applications stores show where friends are, what they
are doing, and how to meet up with them. Loopt generates revenue primarily
through geo-targeted advertisements and promotions.

There are also location-based mobile services that find points of interest and
provide additional information on, for instance, the nearest dry cleaner or Chinese
restaurant or the best locations from which to hail a cab in crowded cities. In
future years, personal location data will enable mobile gaming such as scavenger
hunts or military simulations based on the locations of players (Exhibit 29).

79 We use McKinsey’s proprietary model to arrive at this estimate of projected global emissions
from road transportation in 2020.

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The revenue model for such mobile LBS applications will be a mix of free
services and applications supported by advertising and other revenue, including
sponsored links from restaurants, bars, and other points of interest. Some mobile
applications will feature embedded advertising or require a onetime download
fee or ongoing subscription. In combination, we estimate that the new value
generated by such services could be $80 billion or more in 2020. Some of this
value will accrue as revenue to mobile LBS service providers, but consumers
using the services will obtain much of the total value generated if research into the
consumer surplus generated by online services in general is a guide.80

Exhibit 29
Mobile location-based services (LBS) and applications have proliferated
Revenue through the
“Freemium” model

Mobile LBS applications continue to proliferate1

Revenue model for these mobile
LBS applications will be a mix of

People locating
(e.g., safety family/
child tracking,
friend finder)

▪

Free services/applications
supported by advertising
revenue
– Sponsor links for mobile
location-enabled (e.g.,
nearby point of interest)
search
– Advertising embedded in
mobile applications

▪

Mobile apps requiring premiums
for download or subscription
– Onetime charge to download
apps from mobile
marketplaces
– Recurring subscription fees
for services/content
– Add-on charges, e.g.,
purchase of virtual items in
mobile games

Location check-in/
sharing on social
community
applications

City/regional guide,
neighborhood
service search

Location-enabled
entertainment, e.g.,
mobile gaming, geotagged photo/travel

Geo-tagged
photo

1 Navigation and other applications for non-individual usage have been assessed separately and are not included here.
SOURCE: Press search; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

Organizational use of individual personal location data
1. Geo-targeted advertising. Geo-targeted mobile advertising is one of the most
common ways organizations can create value from the use of personal location
data. For example, consumers who choose to receive geo-targeted ads might
have a personalized advertisement for a favorite store pop up on their smartphone
when they are close to that store. Or a smartphone user meeting with friends
at a bar or restaurant might receive a coupon offer for drinks or food from that
establishment. This technology could direct users to the nearest ATM, provide
location and time-based restaurant reviews, and offer a range of special offers
for stores based on the smartphone user’s location or destination. This type of
advertising was still in its infancy in 2010. However, new geo-targeted advertising
businesses such as ShopAlerts report impressive sales and response results (see
Box 11, “ShopAlerts: Geo-targeted mobile ads”). Compared with more traditional
forms of advertising such as TV or print, geo-targeted campaigns appear to have
higher relevance to the consumer at the moment when a purchase decision is
likely to be made and therefore boost the potential for an actual sale. Advertisers
certainly seem to believe this to be the case, and they are paying increased rates
for this service compared with advertising without geo-targeting.
80 Consumers driving the digital uptake: The economic value of online advertising-based services
for consumers, McKinsey Company for IAB Europe, September 2010.


Box 11. ShopAlerts: Geo-targeted mobile ads
ShopAlerts, developed by PlaceCast of San Francisco and New York, is a
location-based “push SMS” product that companies including Starbucks, North
Face, Sonic, REI, and American Eagle Outfitters are already using to drive traffic
into their stores. Advertisers define a geographic boundary in which to send
opted-in users a push SMS typically in the form of a promotion or advertisement
to visit a particular store; in general, a user would receive no more than three such
alerts a week. ShopAlerts claims 1 million users worldwide. In the United States,
the company says it can locate more than 90 percent of the mobile phones in
use nationwide. The company reports that 79 percent of consumers surveyed
say that they are more likely to visit a store when they receive a relevant SMS;
65 percent of respondents said they made a purchase because of the message;
and 73 percent said they would probably or definitely use the service in the future.
2. Electronic toll collection. Current electronic toll collections require specialized
technology that incurs significant costs, but increasingly commonplace GPS-enabled
mobile phones are likely to spur the development of a toll collection application that
could reduce the overall costs of the system. As an illustration, a mobile phone could
locate the vehicle and tollbooth, pay the toll, and charge it to the user’s phone bill,
eliminating the need for separate transponder devices and additional bill payment
accounts.
3. Insurance pricing. The combination of personal location data and vehicle
telematics has the potential to offer insurers more accurate and detailed data
on individual behavior—for example, how individual policyholders drive their
automobiles. Such information would allow insurers to price risk based on
actual behavior rather than on aggregate demographic factors. Some claim that
behavior-based insurance could even reduce claims costs because individuals
behave in a less risky way when they know they are being monitored. This effect
needs to be proved, but what seems certain is that rapidly improving technologies
based on personal location data have the potential to help insurers develop other
services to encourage safer driving. For instance, insurers could begin offering
real-time alerts on traffic and weather conditions (as we have seen in the case of
smart routing), high-risk parking areas, and changing speed limits.
4. Emergency response. The increasing availability of personal location data, real-time
traffic, and GPS telematics clearly offers scope for faster and more effective response
times by law enforcement officers, firefighters, and ambulance personnel. These
technologies enable emergency service dispatchers to identify quickly the location
of a person reporting an emergency, ensure that personnel can respond as rapidly
as possible (through smart routing), and monitor their own safety in often dangerous
environments.
Macro-level use of aggregate location data
Two quite disparate areas of decision making that can benefit from the analysis of
personal location data in aggregate are urban planning and retail business intelligence,
which we highlight here. However, we are confident that many other applications and
business models will emerge as these technologies improve and their use proliferates.
1. Urban planning. Urban planners can benefit significantly from the analysis of
personal location data. Decisions that can be improved by analyzing such data

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include road and mass-transit construction, the mitigation of traffic congestion, and
planning for high-density development. Urban transit and development planners
will increasingly have access to a large amount of information about peak and offpeak traffic hotspots, volumes and patterns of transit use, and shopping trends,
for instance—and in the process potentially cut congestion and the emission of
pollutants. By drilling down into this wealth of data, urban planners will be more
informed when they make decisions on anything from the placing and sequencing of
traffic lights to the likely need for parking spaces. Singapore’s public transportation
department is already using ten-year demand forecasts partly based on personal
location data to plan transit needs. Traffic agencies in the Netherlands are predicting
traffic and pedestrian congestion using personal location data from mobile phones.
2. Retail business intelligence. Retailers can use personal location data to understand
shopping patterns, aggregating information on foot-traffic density and speed to
generate detailed insights about where shoppers slow down and speed up in response
to promotions and advertising, and then linking these patterns with data on product
purchases, customer demographics, and historical buying patterns. Such granular
intelligence can help to improve a range of business decisions from in-store layout to
merchandising (see Box 12, “How does tracking shoppers’ movements work?”).

Box 12. How does tracking shoppers’ movements work?
Since GPS signals often do not penetrate indoors, retailers can use other electronic
technologies to track shoppers as they move about within stores or shopping
centers (Exhibit 30). These technologies include RFID tags on shopping carts,
dedicated devices carried by customers, video cameras, and several innovative
technologies leveraging mobile phones. Each of these techniques provides a
different level of detail about location. RFID tags are cheap and accurate but often
don’t reflect shoppers detailed movements. For example, a tag can be attached
to a cart that is left in an aisle while the consumer moves about. Video recognition
can be excellent for the management of traffic flow but difficult to use for following
an individual’s behavior. Several technologies, including Shopkick and Path
Intelligence (that we have already noted) are already on the market.
Exhibit 30
How does location tracking work?
Input

Output

RFID Tag

+ Mobile phones
Video

Shopper distribution
Personal
tracking

SOURCE: Press and literature search

Traffic flow


3. Some new business models. As the availability of personal location data becomes
more common and awareness of its value more widespread, other markets will
develop for both aggregated and raw data. For example, Sense Networks is
commercializing Macrosense, a machine-learning technology model that aggregates
historical and real-time mobile phone location data to, for instance, identify the best
street corners from which to hail a taxi (see Box 13, “Sense Networks: Analyzing
aggregated location information”). As another example, the city of Boston has
launched an application called Street Bump that takes advantage of personal location
data to detect potholes. Street Bump uses technology already built into smartphones,
including GPS and accelerometers, and notes the location of the car and the size of
the potholes it crosses. The city has issued a public challenge to users to find the best
methodology for mapping street conditions and making Street Bump as useful as
possible.

Box 13. Sense Networks: Analyzing aggregated location
information
Sense Networks, headquartered in New York City, was founded in 2003 by a
team of computer scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
Columbia University. The company uses real-time and historical personal location
data for predictive analytics. Sense Networks’ first application for consumers was
CitySense, a tool designed to answer the question: “Where is everyone going
right now?” CitySense shows the overall activity level of the city, hotspots, and
places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real time. The tool then links to Yelp
and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations. CabSense,
another Sense Network application released in early 2010, offers users an
aggregated map generated by analyzing tens of millions of data points that ranks
street corners by the number of taxicabs picking up passengers every hour or
every day of the week.

THE VALUE CREATED BY PERSONAL LOCATION DATA IS
SUBSTANTIAL AND GROWING
Our detailed analysis of the major applications of personal location data today and in
the near future finds that, in ten years’ time, these applications have the potential to
create value of $100 billion or more for service providers alone. This additional value
is likely to come primarily from sales of navigation hardware and revenue from LBS,
mobile LBS premiums, and geo-targeted advertising.81 Entrepreneurs will develop
many of these services and applications, given the fact that the application store
model for mobile devices is already providing ready sales and marketing channels,
greatly lowering the barriers to entry for innovative new players.
The likely value that will accrue to providers will be dwarfed by the benefits that
customers—both individuals and businesses—will enjoy because of proliferating
location-based applications. We believe that by 2020, personal location applications
will create as much as $700 billion in value for users (Exhibit 31). Of this, more than
70 percent will be the consumer surplus obtained from time and fuel saved by using
GPS navigation systems (including those with real-time traffic information) and the
use of mobile LBS applications (difference between willingness to pay and the cost
81 We have included navigation hardware sales because these devices are used exclusively for
personal navigation applications. The number would be much larger if it included smartphone
sales, which we exclude because smartphones are used for many purposes that do not
require personal location data.

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of applications). The remaining 30 percent of the total accruing to customers will be
additional value obtained by businesses that make use of location data-enabled
levers such as marketers’ return on geo-targeted mobile advertising.
Exhibit 31
The value of the major levers increases to more than $800 billion by 2020
$ billion per annum
End
user Lever

Revenue accrued to
service providers

Individuals

GPS navigation (including smart routing based on
real-time traffic)

▪
▪
▪
▪

People tracking (social networking and safety)
Location sharing on social community applications
City/regional guide, neighborhood service search
Entertainment such as mobile gaming based on
location

Remote personal car safety/monitoring
(e.g., OnStar)

Quantifiable monetary value
to end customers
500

39

44–57

27

5–10

30–40

Automatic toll collection based on mobile phone
location

2

4–10

Optimized urban transport infrastructure planning

n/a

5

Retail business intelligence based on locationrelated customer behavior (e.g., optimizing store
layouts based on a shopper’s movement pattern)2

Organizations

Geo-targeted mobile advertising1

n/a

n/a

100–120

600–700

Total

75–100

Value shift of
$8 billion–15 billion
1 For sizing the value of geo-targeted mobile advertising, service providers are defined as those that sell advertising inventory,
e.g., advertising platform providers; customers are defined as the marketers who purchase advertising inventory.
2 Individual retailer will gain top-line increase, which represents a value shift rather than value creation at macro-level.

We believe that our estimates of the potential surplus that will accrue to customers
are conservative because they do not include additional sources of utility such as
improvements in user convenience, transparency, and entertainment. Personal
location data-enabled services such as user ranking applications (e.g., Yelp) offer
users all of these benefits. Unfamiliar travelers, for instance, can quickly find shops
and eateries they might favor. Familiar residents can locate friends, the evening’s
most popular nightspots, and the shortest driving route. Furthermore, our estimates
size the potential impact of only a few applications; we expect innovative new uses
of personal location data and business models to continue to emerge. Creativity and
innovation will shift the value potential upward from our present estimates, and a long
tail of specialized applications will combine to offer substantial total additional value.
Individuals and organizations around the world will share in the potential value of personal
location data—nowhere more dramatically than in emerging markets where the already
very large number of mobile phones generating such data is increasing so rapidly..

A RANGE OF BARRIERS NEED TO BE OVERCOME TO REALIZE THE
FULL VALUE OF PERSONAL LOCATION DATA
The creation of much of the potential value enabled by personal location data
will depend on resolving a range of technological and other business issues and
ameliorating institutional and government barriers. Some of these issues and barriers
are familiar; others less so; some are more intractable than others. The challenges


that business and policy makers face include privacy and security concerns,
technology investment and innovation, and managing organizational change.
As the volume and accuracy of personal location data increases, so will concerns
about privacy and security. Laws are generally unclear on which constituency—
from mobile operators, platform owners, application developers, and handset
manufacturers, to actual users—owns the right to collect, aggregate, disseminate,
and use personal location data for commercial purposes. Many commercial
enterprises that state they will protect the privacy of these data have been able to use
them relatively freely. But there are calls from citizens who want to know that their
privacy and the security of their personal location data are protected and who believe
that opt-in/opt-out agreements are unclear. A framework that clearly describes the
permissible and prohibited use of these data would be beneficial for all stakeholders.
It seems inevitable that the technology related to personal location data will continue to
improve as market demand intensifies and mobile devices become ubiquitous around
the world. Our projections for the value that these data will create assume continuing
technological innovation (e.g., Moore’s Law increasing the capabilities of semiconductors)
and infrastructure investment (e.g., in upgraded cell phone base stations for higher
bandwidth), and the widespread adoption of GPS-enabled mobile devices. Although
current civil GPS accuracy appears to be adequate for many existing applications, other
applications will require more fine-grained location data, such as inside buildings.
And there will be technological challenges. For instance, operators of developing
applications will have to be alert to the possibility of novel complications and errors.
The Dutch government, collecting and analyzing highway congestion data based on
the density of mobile phone positions, observed that a particular segment of highway
had a curious congestion peak that appeared and disappeared abruptly every hour.
It transpired that the highway was close to a commuter rail line with a train passing at
peak times on the hour.
All of these aspects of the evolving personal location data domain pose significant
challenges for executives and policy makers. Business leaders should already be
considering the potential benefits of leveraging these data, particularly in the areas
of marketing and improving operational efficiencies, and building business cases
around today’s perceptible opportunities. But they should also experiment with
new business models to derive the maximum value. Executives should work in the
common interest with public policy makers to craft effective privacy policies, the
means to communicate them clearly to the public, and to enhance the security of
information around personal location data. The private and public sectors can also
collaborate on accelerating the development and adoption of infrastructure and
devices that have the potential to generate additional useful personal location data.
For policy makers, the first priority in this rapidly developing domain is to ensure that
appropriate incentives for innovation are in place including developing an up-to-date
framework for intellectual property rules and rights, funding RD in potential breakthrough
areas, and ensuring that the infrastructure, including spectrum policies, is optimal.

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  
Applying personal location data has the potential to provide more than $800 billion
in economic value to individual consumers and organizations over the next
decade, in the process catalyzing the development of a wide range of innovative
businesses across many sectors. Smart navigation applications alone may offer
some $500 billion in value to global consumers in time and fuel saved by 2020.
Geo-targeted advertising is emerging as a highly effective marketing vehicle that
could represent more than 5 percent of total global advertising spending by 2020.
Executives and policy makers need to work together to enable the growth of this data
domain and unleash its full potential.


4. Key findings that apply across
sectors

The use of big data offers tremendous untapped potential for creating value.
Organizations in many industry sectors and business functions can leverage big data
to improve their allocation and coordination of human and physical resources, cut
waste, increase transparency and accountability, and facilitate the discovery of new
ideas and insights. In addition to the five domains we studied in depth, we also found
many other examples in other domains, across geographies, of the tremendous
potential to create value from the use of big data. In this chapter, we synthesize
what we have learned from the five domains we studied in depth as well as our
observations in other domains.

BIG DATA CREATES VALUE IN SEVERAL WAYS
We have identified five broadly applicable ways to leverage big data that offer
transformational potential to create value, and have implications for how individual
organizations will have to be designed, organized, and managed. Questions that
these findings raise include: How will corporate marketing functions and activities
need to evolve if large-scale experimentation is possible and how are business
processes likely to change? How will companies value and leverage their assets
(particularly data assets) and could their access to, and analysis of, data actually
generate more value than, say, a brand? How might big data disrupt established
business models? For example, some industry dynamics rest on the fact that there
are information asymmetries—how would those dynamics change if transparency
around data produced information symmetry instead? How will incumbents with
legacy business models and infrastructures compete with newcomers that do not
face such constraints? And what will the world look like when surplus starts shifting
from suppliers to customers?
1. Creating transparency
Making big data more easily accessible to relevant stakeholders in a timely way can
create tremendous value. Indeed, this aspect of creating value is a prerequisite for
all other levers and is the most immediate way for businesses and sectors that are
today less advanced in embracing big data and its levers to capture that potential. In
many cases, these opportunities exist where there is a misalignment of incentives for
creating data transparency, such as lack of a performance imperative. For example, in
the public sector, we discovered cases where departmental personnel were spending
20 percent of their time searching for information from other government departments
using non-digital means (e.g., paper directories and calling people), and then obtaining
that information by traveling to other locations and picking up data on physical media
such as compact disks. Such wasted effort has been greatly reduced in organizations
that have harnessed big data to digitize that information, make it available through
networks, and deploy search tools to make relevant information easier to find.
However, even in sectors that have embraced IT and big data and where there
are considerable incentives for higher performance, we found room for increasing
transparency and the sharing of big data. In manufacturing, many companies have used
big data to improve performance in RD (e.g., complex simulations) or in the management

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of their supply chains. However, these applications often take advantage of only those
data that are contained within a single functional group in a company. Integrating data from
RD, engineering, and manufacturing units, potentially across several enterprises, can
enable concurrent engineering techniques that can greatly reduce the waste caused from
having to rework designs, and thus accelerate time to market.
2. Enabling experimentation to discover needs, expose variability, and
improve performance
The ability for organizations to instrument—to deploy technology that allows them
to collect data—and sense the world is continually improving. More and more
companies are digitizing and storing an increasing amount of highly detailed data
about transactions. More and more sensors are being embedded in physical
devices—from assembly-line equipment to automobiles to mobile phones—that
measure processes, the use of end products, and human behavior. Individual
consumers, too, are creating and sharing a tremendous amount of data through
blogging, status updates, and posting photos and videos. Much of these data can
now be collected in real or near real time.
Having access to all of these data and in some cases being able to manipulate the
conditions under which they are generated enable a very different way of making
decisions that involves bringing more science into management—i.e., applying
classic scientific methods to the practice of management.82 Specifically, managers
now can use a scientific process of controlled experimentation that includes the
formulation of specific hypotheses, designing and conducting experiments (including
control and treatment groups) to test those hypotheses, and then rigorously
analyzing the quantitative results before making a decision. Many companies make
decisions in a highly ad hoc way—as some have put it, through “management by
HiPPOs, the Highest Paid Person’s Opinions.”83 A data-driven organization makes
decisions on the basis of the empirical results, and the benefits of such an approach
toward data have been demonstrated by academic research.84
Leaders in many sectors are already beginning to use controlled experiments to make
better decisions. For instance, the health care sector now conducts comparative
effectiveness studies on population-wide clinical data to identify and understand the
sources of variability in treatments and outcomes, identify treatment protocols that are
most effective and efficient, and help decision makers to create guidelines designed to
ensure that treatment decisions are based on the best science. Retailers, especially those
that operate online but increasingly also those with physical stores, are adjusting prices
and promotions in a bid to experiment with which combination best drives traffic and sales.
It isn’t always possible (perhaps for ethical reasons or feasibility) to set up a controlled
experiment to manipulate an independent variable. An alternative is seek out “natural
experiments” to identify existing variability in performance metrics. Understanding
the drivers of this naturally occurring variability can then be used to guide

82 Janaki Akella, Timo Kubach, Markus Löffler, and Uwe Schmid, Data-driven management:
Bringing more science into management, McKinsey Technology Initiative Perspective, 2008.
83 The earliest reference we have to this acronym was by Google analytics evangelist Avinash
Kaushik. See Seven steps to creating a data driven decision making culture, October 2006
(www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/10/seven-steps-to-creating-a-data-driven-decision-makingculture.html).
84 Erik Brynjolfsson, Lorin M. Hitt, and Heekyung Hellen Kim, Strength in numbers: How does
data-driven decisionmaking affect firm performance?, April 2011, available at SSRN (ssrn.com/
abstract=1819486).


management levers to improve that performance. In the public sector, we found large
agencies that discovered huge variations in the productivity and accuracy of work
at different sites performing nearly identical tasks. Simply making this information
available across sites had the effect of spurring locations that were lagging to improve
their performance significantly. No changes in compensation were promised; once
people knew they were underperforming, their competitive nature kicked in and
their observing best practices in the top-performing sites helped to transform their
performance without monetary incentives.
3. Segmenting populations to customize actions
Targeting services or marketing to meet individual needs is already familiar to
consumer-facing companies. For them, the idea of segmenting and analyzing their
customers through combinations of attributes such as demographics, customer
purchase metrics, and shopping attitudes and behavior is firmly established.
Companies such as insurance companies and credit card issuers that rely on
risk judgments have also long used big data to segment customers. However, as
technology improves, many companies have been able to segment and analyze in near
real time. Even in the public sector that tends to treat all constituencies the same, using
big data to segment is catching on. For instance, some public labor agencies have
used big data to tailor job training services for different segments of job seekers, the
aim being to ensure that the most efficient and effective interventions are applied to get
different people back to work. Another example from the public sector is tax agencies
that segment taxpayers by a range of factors including income, past delinquent rate,
and credit history to identify returns that are most appropriate for further audits.
4. Replacing/supporting human decision making with automated
algorithms
Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision making, minimize risks, and
unearth valuable insights that would otherwise remain hidden. Big data either provides
the raw material needed to develop algorithms or for those algorithms to operate. Best
practice tax agencies, for instance, use automated risk engines that use big data to flag
candidates for further examination. Big data algorithms in retail can optimize decision
processes, enabling the automatic fine tuning of inventories and pricing in response to
real time in-store and online sales. Manufacturing companies can adjust production
lines automatically to optimize efficiency, reduce waste, and avoid dangerous
conditions. In some cases, companies will not necessarily automate decisions but
facilitate them by analyzing datasets that are far larger than those data pools that are
manageable for an individual using a spreadsheet. Some organizations are already
making more effective decisions by analyzing entire datasets from customers and
employees, or even from sensors embedded in products. Big-data-based analytics
today include rule-based systems, statistical analyses, and machine-learning
techniques such as neural networks. This is a fast-moving area, and new forms of databased analytics are being developed all the time. (See chapter on “Big data techniques
and technologies.”)
5. Innovating new business models, products and services
Big data enables enterprises of all kinds to create new products and services,
enhance existing ones, and invent entirely new business models. In health care,
analyzing patient clinical and behavior data has created preventive care programs
targeting the most appropriate groups of individuals. Castlight Health is a company
that analyzes big data to make available to patients in large health plans data on
health care pricing that they don’t normally see. Ingenix in the health care sector and

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Nielsen in retail specialize in the aggregation and analysis of various datasets for
institutions. Also in retailing, real-time price comparison services give consumers
price transparency to a degree never before enjoyed and generate significant
surplus for them. Manufacturers are using data obtained from sensors embedded
in products to create innovative after-sales service offerings such as proactive
maintenance (preventive measures that take place before a failure occurs or is even
noticed) and as the basis for the development of next generations of products. The
emergence of real-time location data has created an entirely new suite of locationbased mobile services from navigation applications to people tracking.

WHILE THE USE OF BIG DATA WILL MATTER ACROSS SECTORS,
SOME SECTORS ARE POISED FOR GREATER GAINS
Using a value potential index that combines several quantitative metrics, we compared
the historical productivity of sectors in the United States with the potential of these
sectors to capture value from big data.85 We observed that patterns vary from sector to
sector (Exhibit 32).86
Exhibit 32
Cluster A

9.0
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1.0
0.5
0
-0.5
-1.0
-1.5
-2.0
-2.5
-3.0
-3.5
Low

Cluster E

Cluster C

Historical productivity growth in the United States, 2000–08
%

24.0
23.5
23.0
22.5

Cluster D

Cluster B

Some sectors are positioned for greater gains from
the use of big data

Bubble sizes denote
relative sizes of GDP


Information

Administration, support, and
waste management

Wholesale trade
Manufacturing
Finance and insurance
Real estate and rental
Utilities

Health care providers

Retail trade
Accommodation and food
Arts and entertainment

Government
Natural resources

Management of companies
Other services


Construction

Big data value potential index1

High

1 See appendix for detailed definitions and metrics used for value potential index.

Globally traded computer and electronic products and information sectors (Cluster
A) are sectors that have already posted very strong productivity growth and are set to
gain substantially from using big data. These sectors have access to huge pools of data
(e.g., Internet companies collect vast amounts of online behavior data) and the pace of

85 We studied the United States because of the relative availability of relevant data, particularly
around the numbers and sizes of individual firms. The applicability of these specific findings in
other geographies will vary based on the similarities of individual sectors.
86 The value potential index consists of five metrics that are designed as proxies to indicate (1)
the amount of data available for use and analysis; (2) variability in performance; (3) number
of stakeholders (customers and suppliers) with which an organization deals on average;
(4) transaction intensity; and (5) turbulence inherent in a sector. We believe that these are
the characteristics that make a sector more or less likely to take advantage of the five
transformative big data opportunities. See the appendix for further details.


innovation is very high (e.g., rapid product introductions in consumer electronics). Even
in the near term, we see significant scope to capture more value from big data.
Two services sectors (Cluster B)—finance insurance and government—are
positioned to benefit very strongly from big data as long as barriers to its use can be
overcome. These sectors are both transaction- and customer-intensive, suggesting
that they can increase their application of levers involving segmentation and automated
algorithms. They both also have high degrees of variability in their performance,
suggesting that they could use data and experimentation to improve performance.
Several sectors (Cluster C) including construction, educational services, and arts
and entertainment, have posted negative productivity growth, which probably
indicates that these sectors face strong systemic barriers to increasing productivity.
Nevertheless, if those barriers can be overcome, we think that big data can enable
productivity increases even in these sectors. Examples of where potential exists
include measuring variations in the performance of teachers in improving the
academic achievement of students—teacher value added—that can be an effective
tool for helping to increase productivity in education.
Among the remaining sectors, globally traded sectors (mostly Cluster D) (e.g.,
manufacturing, wholesale trade) tend to have experienced higher historical
productivity growth, while local services (mainly Cluster E) (e.g., retail, health care
providers, accommodation and food) have achieved lower growth. Many of these
sectors can derive significant value from big data, although doing so will depend on
the extent to which barriers are overcome. Sectors that may have more moderate
potential from the use of big data, such as construction and administrative services,
tend not to have characteristics that could make exploiting big data opportunities
more challenging than in other sectors.. They have less data than other sectors and
fewer stakeholders, and are also less transaction-intensive.
Our index indicates that of the sectors that we studied in detail, two—health care and
manufacturing—appear to have only modest potential from the use of big data. This
is because the index measures several criteria at the level of the individual firm (e.g.,
amount of data per firm as a proxy for number of customers per firm). In the United
States, for instance, both of these industries are highly fragmented—they have many
more firms or players than other sectors. Given that data are usually fragmented
along firm or organizational boundaries, this implies that big data opportunities
will be limited across these sectors. Nevertheless, even in these industries, largescale players have the ability to aggregate enough data to derive significant value
(see chapter 3a on health care for examples). Furthermore, it is possible, albeit
usually more challenging, for many individual firms to pool, share, or trade data,
sometimes through third parties, in order to capture value from big data (see, in
particular, chapter 3d on manufacturing, where global distributed supply chains can
be optimized by sharing big data). Consolidation in an industry can also bring about
beneficial scale effects in the aggregation and analysis of data.
While all sectors will have to overcome barriers to capture value from the use of
big data, barriers are structurally higher for some than for others (Exhibit 33). For
example, government may face higher hurdles because of challenges around data
availability and data-driven mind-sets. Education faces similar challenges, along with
a relative lack of investment in IT. Moreover, the competitive intensity in these sectors
is relatively low compared with those sectors where market forces work more freely.
In more market-driven sectors, the imperative to leverage data is strengthened by
more direct links to economic value for the firms and users involved. Sectors such as

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finance insurance, manufacturing, and professional services may have relatively
lower degrees of barriers to overcome for precisely the opposite reasons.
Exhibit 33
across sectors
Categories

Sectors

Overall
ease of
capture
index1

Top quintile

4th quintile

2nd quintile

Bottom quintile

3rd quintile

No data available

Talent

IT intensity

Data-driven Data
mind-set
availability

Manufacturing

Goods

Construction
Natural resources
Wholesale trade
Information

Services

Retail trade

Regulated
and public

Government
Utilities


BIG DATA OFFERS VERY LARGE POTENTIAL TO GENERATE VALUE
GLOBALLY, BUT SOME GEOGRAPHIES COULD GAIN FIRST
Our five case studies covered both developed and emerging economies and our
findings suggest that the use of big data can drive significant value across geographies.
We found very significant potential to create value in developed markets by applying
big data levers in health care and retail. However, if we take the time savings for drivers
achievable from using navigation tools in the personal location data domain, we find
that 20 to 40 percent of the global potential is in emerging markets.
Different economies and regions exhibit very different characteristics from the
amount of data they generate to the maturity of their ICT infrastructure. This indicates
that some geographies might be poised to capture value more quickly than others.
Access to big data is a key prerequisite to capturing value. Today, North America
and Europe account for the majority of new data stored (Exhibit 34). This suggests
that, in the near term at least, much of the global potential to create value through
the use of big data will be in the most developed economies. Although this may be
true in aggregate, individual firms in emerging markets could enjoy access to big
data that could enable them to capture significant value. In addition, organizations
in developing markets could store and analyze their data in data centers located in
developed markets.


103

As long as the right conditions are in place, there is significant potential to leverage
big data in developing economies. Consider the fact that Asia is already the leading
region for the generation of personal location data simply because so many mobile
phones are in use. More mobile phones—an estimated 800 million devices in
2010—are in use in China than in any other country (see Exhibit 28). Furthermore,
although some emerging market organizations lag behind their counterparts in
developed market in terms of IT assets, this could actually prove to be an advantage.
Organizations in developing economies could leapfrog to the latest technology,
by-passing the legacy systems with which many of their counterparts in advanced
economies have to grapple.
Exhibit 34
Amount of new data stored varies across geography
New data stored1 by geography, 2010
Petabytes

3,500
North
America

2,000

200
50
Latin
America

250

Europe

Middle East
and Africa

China

400
Japan

50
India

300
Rest of APAC

1 New data stored defined as the amount of available storage used in a given year; see appendix for more on the definition and
assumptions.
SOURCE: IDC storage reports; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

THERE WILL BE A SHORTAGE OF THE TALENT ORGANIZATIONS
NEED TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF BIG DATA
A shortage of people with the skills necessary to take advantage of the insights that
large datasets generate is one of the most important constraints on an organization’s
ability to capture the potential from big data. Leading companies are already reporting
challenges in hiring this type of talent. Google’s chief economist Hal Varian has been
reported as saying that “the sexy job of the next ten years will be statisticians.”87
Our research identifies three key types of talent required to capture value from big
data: deep analytical talent—people with technical skills in statistics and machine
learning, for example, who are capable of analyzing large volumes of data to derive
business insights; data-savvy managers and analysts who have the skills to be
effective consumers of big data insights—i.e., capable of posing the right questions
for analysis, interpreting and challenging the results, and making appropriate
decisions; and supporting technology personnel who develop, implement, and
maintain the hardware and software tools such as databases and analytic programs
needed to make use of big data. We expect the supply of talent in all of these
categories to be a significant constraint on the ability of organizations around the

87 Steve Lohr, “For today’s graduate, just one word: Statistics,” New York Times, August 5, 2009.

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world to capture value from big data, with the most acute needs in the first and
second categories.88 Given the amount of data on talent readily available, we used
the US labor market to test this hypothesis.89
The US labor market has historically had a high level of graduates with degrees in
the so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
However, in recent years, the supply of such graduates has been sluggish at a time
when demand for them has been rising. For example, at the peak of the last US
economic expansion, employment for mathematics-related occupations increased
by almost 4 percent and their real wages increased 1 percent; at this time national
employment increased by only 1.5 percent and real wages rose by only 0.6 percent.90
During this period, the number of advanced degrees conferred in math, statistics,
and engineering declined by around 2 percent. In the future, the need for talent able
to deal with big data will, in fact, be much more specific than simply STEM graduates.
For this reason, we conducted a detailed analysis comparing potential demand for
the first two categories of big data talent—deep analytical talent and data-savvy
managers and analysts—with projected supply on current trends.
In the case of deep analytical talent, we used US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
data on current occupations to analyze the supply of talent in the US workforce. The
data were from 2008, the latest year for which complete data are available. We used
existing BLS models to project the supply of deep analytical talent in 2018, assuming
current trends hold.
We then used two separate analytical models to triangulate a perspective on the
potential demand for deep analytical talent, assuming that companies across the
economy fully adopt big data techniques by 2018. We based the first of these two
models on an adaptation of the BLS model to account for varying degrees of growth
in deep analytical talent based on the data intensity of different companies. We
based the second model on the required numbers of deep analytic talent in different
industries according to company size.
We estimate that the supply in the United States of deep analytical talent in 2008 was
around 150,000 positions. If we take into account current trends in new graduates with
deep analytical training (e.g., people taking graduate courses in statistics or machine
learning, a subspecialty of computer science, or students taking such courses
designed for their last year of undergraduate education) and immigration, this total rises
to about 300,000. However, in a big data world, we expect demand for deep analytical
talent could reach 440,000 to 490,000 positions in 2018—that’s a talent gap in this
category alone of 140,000 to 190,000 positions. In short, the United States will need
an additional supply of this class of talent of 50 to 60 percent (Exhibit 35). Developing
deep analytical skills requires an intrinsic aptitude in mathematics for starters, and then
takes years of training. Addressing the talent shortage will not happen overnight, and
the search for deep analytical talent that has already begun can only intensify.

88 We also did not prioritize the analysis of the supporting IT talent because other researchers
have researched and debated this issue extensively.
89 In general, we found detailed occupational data on categories of knowledge workers to be
relatively scarce outside the United States. See chapter on “Implications for policy makers” for
a recommendation that more detailed data on these categories be collected.
90 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 15: Computer and mathematical occupations as
defined by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.


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Exhibit 35
The United States graduates the largest number of people with
deep analytical training
Number of graduates with deep analytical training in 20081
Total
Thousand
United States
China
India
Russia
Brazil

17.41
13.27
12.30

Czech Republic
Bulgaria
Switzerland
Portugal
Belgium
Greece
Denmark
Slovakia
Norway
Lithuania
Austria
Sweden
Latvia
Hungary
Other2

8.11
1.31
1.12
8.66

10.09
8.78

Poland
United Kingdom
France
Romania
Italy
Japan
Germany
Turkey
Netherlands
Spain

Graduates per 100 people

24.73

5.32
23.03

8.34
7.77

13.58
12.47

4.97

23.12

4.90
3.40
3.32

8.25
2.66
4.05

1.84
1.25

2.64

1.23

2.71

7.58

0.95
0.92
0.76
0.75

9.12

7.04

0.71

6.66

12.15
9.93

0.66
0.61

5.97
11.21

0.50
0.41

9.25
8.61

0.37
0.37
0.29
0.27
0.21
0.55

11.16
4.47
3.16
12.01
2.06
4.86

1 These data count new graduates, i.e., a flow of deep analytical talent, which we define as people with advanced training in
statistics and/or machine learning and who conduct data analysis.
2 Other includes Finland, Estonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Iceland, Cyprus, Macedonia, and Malta.
SOURCE: Eurostat; Russia Statistics; Japan Ministry of Education; India Sat; NASSCOM Strategic Review 2005; China
Statistical Yearbook; China Education News; IMF World Economic Outlook Database

Although we conducted this analysis in the United States, we believe that the
shortage of deep analytical talent will be a global phenomenon. There are significant
variations, however, both in gross and per capita terms, in the number of graduates
with these skills that different countries are producing. Countries with a higher per
capita production of deep analytical talent could potentially be attractive sources of
these skills for other geographies either through immigration or through companies
offshoring to meet their needs (Exhibits 36 and 37).
In the case of data-savvy managers and analysts in a big data world, the level of training
and mathematical aptitude is much lower than that required for deep analytical talent.
People in these roles simply need enough conceptual knowledge and quantitative skills
to be able to frame and interpret analyses in an effective way. It is possible to develop
such skills through a single course in statistics and experimental design. However,
managers and analysts will be necessary in every sector. We applied a methodology
similar to that used to analyze deep analytical talent to understand the potential gap
between projected demand and supply. By 2018, in the United States, we estimate that
4 million positions will require these types of skills in a big data world. However, if we
add together the number of people with these skills and new graduates who will enter
the market (on current trends), we reach a total of only 2.5 million people in the United
States in 2018. So there is a potential shortfall of 1.5 million data-savvy managers and
analysts. This is not a gap likely to be filled simply by changing graduate requirements

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and waiting for people to graduate with enhanced skills or importing talent (although
these could be important actions to take). Thus, retraining the existing workforce will be
necessary.
Exhibit 36
China could narrow the gap with the United States, today’s leading
supplier of deep analytical talent

Compound
annual growth
rate, 2004–08, %

Top ten in the supply of deep analytical talent
Thousand people

25

United States

3.9

China

10.4

20

15

India1
Russia
Brazil
Poland
United Kingdom
France2
Romania
Italy
Japan

10

5

0
2004

05

06

07

1.5
6.2
12.8
2.5
-14.4
32.9
18.9
-5.3

08

1 India ranked third in 2008 with 13,270 people with deep analytical skills but India does not have a time series for these data.
2 For France, the compound annual growth rate is for 2005 and 2008 because of data availability.
SOURCE: Eurostat; national statistical agencies; Japan Ministry of Education; India Sat; NASSCOM; China Statistical
Yearbook; China Education News, April 2005; IMF World Economic Outlook; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

Exhibit 37
Big data constituencies

Individuals/organizations using data1

Providers of technology

Indirect beneficiaries

Big data activity/value chain

Government regulators

Government regulators
Consume data and
derive value

Generate data

Aggregate data

Analyze data

Individual data producers/
sources

Individuals who aggregate
data

Individuals who analyze
data

Individual data users

SME2 data producers/
sources

SMEs2 that aggregate data

SMEs2 that analyze data

SME2 data users

Large enterprise data
producers/sources

Large enterprises that
aggregate data

Large enterprises that
analyze data

Large enterprise data users

Providers of technology to
generate data (e.g., sensors,
hardware)

Third-party data
aggregators (e.g., price
comparisons, Mint, Sense
Network)

Third-party analysis/service
providers (e.g., price
comparisons, Mint, LBS, ad
publishers, and
intermediaries)

Indirect beneficiaries

Storage providers (including services)
Software/service providers in business intelligence, search
1 Individuals/organizations generating, aggregating, analyzing, or consuming data.
2 Small and medium-sized enterprises.


SEVERAL ISSUES WILL HAVE TO BE ADDRESSED TO CAPTURE
THE FULL POTENTIAL OF BIG DATA
Data policies
As an ever larger amount of data is digitized and travels across organizational
boundaries, there are a set of policy issues that will become increasingly important,
including, but not limited to, privacy, security, intellectual property, and even liability.91
More information than ever is known about individuals, including sensitive data such
as health and financial records, and many citizens will demand that companies and
their governments to protect their privacy. Personal data such as health and financial
records are often those that can offer the most significant human benefits, such as
helping to pinpoint the right medical treatment, or the most appropriate financial
product. However, consumers also view these categories of data as being the most
sensitive. Individuals, companies, and governments will need to be thoughtful about
the trade-offs between privacy and utility.
We are already seeing data security becoming a more pressing issue now that data
are a key factor of production and a competitive asset. One study found that the
number of compromised records increased by 30 percent each year between 2005
and 2009 in the United States.92 Another study found that security compromises
cost more than $200 per record in detection, notification, and remediation efforts, as
well as customers lost.93 Such security breaches affect a range of sectors including
financial institutions, retail, hotels, and even national defense.
Big data’s increasing economic importance also raises a number of legal issues,
especially when coupled with the fact that data are fundamentally different from
many other assets. Data can be copied perfectly and easily combined with other
data, and the same piece of data can be used simultaneously by more than one
person. So, intellectual property will become an even more important consideration
for policy makers, who will set the rules that determine the legal rights associated
with the ownership and use of data, and what constitutes “fair use” of data. Liability—
such as who is responsible when an inaccurate piece of data leads to negative
consequences—is another issue likely to come to the fore.
Technology and techniques
Today, legacy systems and incompatible standards and formats today often
prevent the integration of data and the more sophisticated analytics that create
value from big data. Organizations will need to deploy new technologies and
techniques as they develop to overcome this barrier. Ultimately, making use of large
digital datasets will require the assembly of a technology stack from storage and
computing through analytical and visualization software applications. The specific
technology requirements and priorities will vary based on the big data levers that are
to be implemented and the data maturity of an institution, leading to very different
levels of investment costs. Some companies lack the technology to capture data
digitally in the first place (e.g., some smaller US health care provider practices) or to
extract, transform, and load large datasets from other sources. Other organizations
will need to supplement their existing storage or computing resources. Many will
91 Data privacy and security are important and pervasive concerns, which are being studied
and debated at great length elsewhere, but have not been the major focus of the research in
this report.
92 The leaking vault: Five years of data breaches, Digital Forensics Association, July 2010.
93 Fourth annual US cost of data breach study, Ponemon Institute, January 2009.

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need to implement advanced analytical and visualization software tools. In many
cases, legacy systems and incompatible standards and formats will have to be
taken into account. Examples include joining different data pools as we might see
at financial services companies that want to combine online financial transaction
data, the behavior of customers in branches, data from partners such as insurance
companies, and retail purchase history. Also, many levers require a tremendous
scale of data (e.g., merging patient records across multiple providers), which can
put unique demands upon technology infrastructures. To provide a framework
under which to develop and manage the many interlocking technology components
necessary to successfully execute big data levers, each organization will need to craft
and execute a robust enterprise data strategy.
Organizational change and talent
Organizational leaders need to understand that big data can unlock value—and how
to use it to that effect. It is vital that organizations learn how to leverage big data if they
don’t know how to already—because many of their rivals will certainly be using big data
to carve out competitive advantage. As we have noted, many organizations neither
have the skilled personnel they need to mine big data for insights nor the structures and
incentives required to use big data to make more informed decisions and act on them.
Access to data
Access to data will need to broaden to capture the full potential for value creation.
Increasingly, companies will need to acquire access to third-party data sources
and integrate external information with their own, to capture the full potential of big
data. In many cases, efficient markets are yet to be set up for trading or sharing data.
For example, there are no efficient markets for the sharing of aggregate movement
patterns derived from mobile phones—potentially valuable to retailers trying to
understand consumer behavior. In other cases, incentives are misaligned so that
stakeholders want to keep the information to themselves. In health care, for instance,
providers will need to make a large big data investment to create, aggregate and
analyze digital clinical data from medical records, which may reveal information that
payors will use to their advantage in contract negotiations (e.g., payors direct patients
away from providers with high cost but average performance). In order to fully capture
the value that can be enabled by big data, the barriers to accessing data will have to
be overcome.
Industry structure
The relative ease—of difficulty—of capturing value from big data will sometimes
depend on the structure of a particular sector or industry. Sectors with a relative lack
of competitive intensity and performance transparency and industries with highly
concentrated profit pools are likely to be slow to fully leverage the benefits of big data.
The public sector, for example, tends to have limited competitive pressure, which
limits efficiency and productivity and puts a higher barrier up against the capture of
value from using big data. US health care not only has a lack of transparency in terms
of the cost and quality of treatment but also an industry structure in which payors
gain from the use of clinical data (e.g., from fewer payouts for unnecessary treatment)
but at the expense of the providers (e.g., fewer medical activities to charge for) from
whom they would have to obtain those clinical data. As these examples suggest,
organization leaders and policy makers need to consider how industry structures
could evolve in a big data world if they are to determine how to optimize value creation
in firms, sectors, and economies as a whole.


  
Our research suggests that there is a range of ways that big data can create value that
companies and organizations, including governments, can apply across sectors.
But to do so with maximum effectiveness will require all these players to overcome
a range of barriers and to address key issues that are of deep concern to the public,
notably privacy and security. In the next two chapters, we will discuss what companies,
organizations, and policy makers can do to ease the path toward the full capture of the
value that big data can create.

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5. Implications for organization leaders

As big data and its levers become an increasingly valuable asset, their intelligent
exploitation will be critical for enterprises to compete effectively. We already see
organizations that understand and embrace the use of big data pulling ahead of their
peers in tangible corporate performance measures. The use of big data will become a
key basis of competition across sectors, so it is imperative that organizational leaders
begin to incorporate big data into their business plans.
While the particular opportunities to leverage big data to create value will differ by
sectors, as we have demonstrated in our domain case studies, organization leaders
can start identifying and assessing the opportunities along the five cross-cutting
themes we have identified. In addition, there is a set of common enablers that each
executive should address in order to unlock the power of big data. Organizations
will not only need to ensure that they have sufficient skills in back-office analytics
but also manage a transition toward the right managerial talent on the front line that
will be capable of executing strategy based on the insights analysts mine from big
data.

1. INVENTORY DATA ASSETS: PROPRIETARY, PUBLIC, AND
PURCHASED
With data becoming a key competitive asset, leaders must understand the assets
that they hold or to which they could have access. Organizations should conduct an
inventory of their own proprietary data, and also systematically catalog other data
to which they could potentially gain access, including publicly available data (e.g.,
government data, other data that are released into the public domain), and data that
can be purchased (e.g., from data aggregators or other players in a data value chain).
Indeed, to enable transformative opportunities, companies will increasingly need to
acquire access to third-party data sources, integrating such information with their
own. In some cases, organizations will be able to purchase access to the data. In
other cases, the sources of third-party data might not have considered sharing it.
Organizations will need to thoughtfully consider and present a compelling value
proposition for these third parties to share or sell data to them, or determine another
set of incentives (e.g., regulatory action) to ensure data access. A set of technology
challenges (e.g., standardizing data, implementing data feeds) will often have to be
addressed to ensure consistent, reliable, and timely access to external data.
For example, many companies have recently discovered the value of data from social
media. Telecom companies have found that some information from social networks
is useful in predicting customer churn. They discovered that customers who know
others who have stopped using a certain telecom are more likely to do so themselves,
so these likely-to-churn customers are then targeted for retention programs. Other
consumer-facing companies have found that they can learn about customers’
attitudes, buying trends, and taste from sentiments expressed online, allowing
them to make timely changes in their marketing, and going forward changes in their
product planning.

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2. IDENTIFY POTENTIAL VALUE CREATION OPPORTUNITIES AND
THREATS
We have described five cross-cutting categories of value creation through leveraging
big data that can be applied across every function. Organizations should begin a
process of identifying and prioritizing these opportunities; business line and function
leaders should kick off processes in their respective areas of responsibility. It is
worthwhile noting that identifying opportunities and potential sources of valuable
data (see previous section), especially external sources of data, will often be an
iterative, rather than sequential, process.
In order to validate these big data opportunities, leading organizations have
often discovered that adopting a process of purposeful experimentation (a metaapplication of the big data lever of experimentation) can be the most powerful path
toward becoming an organization that fully leverages big data, rather that specifying
a complete plan for the enterprise prior to doing any implementation. Selecting
a few high-potential areas in which to experiment with big data, e.g., with digital
marketing, and then rapidly scaling successes can be an effective way to begin the
transformation.
In our research, we find that creating substantial new value does not necessarily
require jumping directly to complex analytical big data levers. In many cases, the
levers focused primarily on making data available or applying basic analytics can
create substantial value even before an organization adopts more advanced levers.
We see this in health care, where creating transparency and applying basic levers can
generate about 40 percent of the value creation potential alone. Indeed, we find that
most organizations follow a journey that builds capabilities over time.
Our research identified four levels of maturity or sophistication to categorize actions
that can be taken. Most basic is digitizing and structuring the data, which is really
the step before the use of big data. It consists of the steps that ensure the data are
generated, structured, and organized in such a way that they can be used either
directly by end users or for further analysis. These techniques include “scrubbing”
the data to remove errors and ensure data quality, placing data into standard forms,
and adding metadata that describe the data being collected. The second level of
sophistication requires making the data available, e.g., through networks, which
is aligned with the first of the five categories of big data levers discussed earlier. It
can be a powerful driver of value in and of itself, and it can also be an important first
step in integrating datasets to create more meaningful business insight. The third
level of sophistication is applying basic analytics, which essentially covers a range
of methodologies, such as basic data comparisons, and relatively standardized
quantitative analyses, e.g., those that do not require customized analyses to be
designed by people with deep analytical skills. The fourth and highest level is
applying advanced analytics, such as the automated algorithms and real-time
data analysis that often can create radical new business insight and models. They
allow new levels of experimentation to develop optimal approaches to targeting
customers and operations, and opening new big data opportunities with third
parties. Leveraging big data at this level often requires the expertise of deep
analytical talent.
In addition to examining the potential based on the level of capabilities within
an organization, leaders can also examine different opportunities through the
lens of the types of data identified during the data inventory. There is likely to be
a set of opportunities related to capturing value from the proprietary datasets
that an organization already has, particularly through additional analyses. For


example, a health care provider might discover that it can analyze a set of clinical
outcomes data to better identify the sources of medical errors. A second category
of opportunities comes from adding new sets of data that can be captured or
acquired (public and purchased) to these analyses. These datasets will often
involve nonstandard data types, because these are data that are not usually used
within the organization. For instance, an insurance company might discover that
adding remote sensing data (images from satellites) can help it to better assess
real-estate property risks. A third set of opportunities comes from considering new
business and business models that are built fundamentally on big data, and not
necessarily based on the same kinds of analyses that support existing businesses.
For example, a payments provider might find that it create a new business by selling
consumer insights based on the data streams it generates (so-called exhaust
data) while processing payments.
Organizations should also watch for the potential disruptions big data can underpin.
Within the context of the big data value chain (Exhibit 39), aggregation and analysis
are becoming increasingly valuable so data generators are adding those capabilities
to more fully realize potential value as well as to defend against new entrants focusing
solely on aggregation and analysis. For example, a big data retailer such as Tesco
plays along the entire value chain to realize fullest potential. It taps its loyalty program
to collect customer purchase data, which it then analyzes to inform a variety of
decisions, including the micro-segmentation of its customers to optimize product
mix, pricing, and promotions. Another example of forward integration in the data
value chain is large health care payors, some of whom are getting into the business
of aggregating and analyzing clinical data with claims data, to provide data services
to customers such as pharmaceutical companies. Again, moving into aggregation
and analysis may be a defensive move to preempt new entrants. In some sectors,
third-party data aggregators, which do not generate data themselves, provide
value-added service on top of the aggregated data to benefit customers. In financial
services, for instance, the online company Mint (acquired by Intuit), aggregates
financial information about individuals and provides value-added services (e.g.,
financial planning tools), even though it does not generate financial data itself. Mint
and others using this business model may pose a threat to traditional financial
institutions by owning customer relationships through their more comprehensive
view of a consumer’s entire financial position.
Organizations should also watch for the emergence of cross-sector domains, such
as personal location data, where innovations are happening very quickly. They often
have highly fragmented data value chains, with many stakeholders playing different
roles, all trying to figure out business models that will maximize their share of the
profit pool.
Indeed, the need for scale of data and IT infrastructure may become a critical driver
toward consolidation, which can be both an opportunity and threat, in sectors where
subscale players are abundant. The health care provider space is a good example
where many relatively small physician practices remain. As they move into the digital
age of electronic medical records and start trying to derive benefit from data, they
may find it economical to merge with others to increase scale.
Increased data access, facilitated by the cloud, may also disrupt business and
operation models. Many examples of distributed co-creation involve collaboration
with external partners and customers to perform many corporate functions, from
RD (e.g., open source software development) to marketing (e.g., online advertising
competition) and customer service (e.g., online customer support communities), that
have traditionally been done internally by employees.

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Exhibit 38
MGI has compiled a heat map of
the value potential of using big data
across sectors
Categories

Sectors

Overall
value
potential
index1

Top quintile
(highest potential)

4th quintile

2nd quintile

Amount
of data
per firm

Bottom quintile
(lowest potential)

3rd quintile

No data available

Customer
Variabili- and
Transty in per- supplier action
formance intensity intensity

Turbulence

Manufacturing

Goods

Construction
Natural resources
Wholesale trade
Information

Services

Retail trade

Regulated
and public

Government
Utilities


3. BUILD UP INTERNAL CAPABILITIES TO CREATE A DATADRIVEN ORGANIZATION
Organizations will need to have the right people and processes to capture value from
the use of big data. On people, MGI research indicates that the key sets of talent
that will be in increasingly short supply are deep analytical talent to execute big data
analyses; managers and analysts who know how to request and consume big data
analyses; and supporting technology personnel to implement big data. We focus on
the first two categories in this section and address the third in the following section on
implementing an enterprise data strategy.
Best practice big data companies have built sufficient scale in a core group of deep
analytical talent, upon which the rest of their organization can draw. Given the
potential competition for this talent, organizations must recruit deep analytical talent
aggressively. This could include sourcing talent from other geographies or procuring
some analytical services from vendors. One important point to note is that early hires
are critical because they are the ones who build the teams. It is difficult to find people
who are willing to hire their replacements, so hiring the most capable people early
on is the best way to build a highly effective team. One financial services company
respected for its use of data and experimentation, for instance, has identified a
network of target institutions that are known for turning out superior deep analytical
talent and that are in close proximity to headquarters. The company has developed
a relationship with these institutions so it not only has a prominent presence during
recruiting season, but also uses the institutions as ongoing training avenues, where
the company sends deep analytical employees to get recharged and learn new
techniques.


Leaders will also need to figure out how to organize this cadre of deep analytical
talent so that as they form an internal community or center of excellence, they are
effectively connected to the rest of the organization and can collaborate well with
business leaders. Furthermore, retaining and motivating this valuable cadre of
talent will, in a way similar to the case of other high-level knowledge workers, require
monetary and, more importantly, intrinsic incentives such as interesting problems to
solve.94
But having a core set of deep analytical talent is not enough to transform an
organization, especially if the key business leaders and analysts do not know
how to take advantage of this big data capability. All of the business leaders in an
organization will have to develop a baseline understanding of analytical techniques in
order to become effective users of these types of analyses. Organizations can modify
their recruiting criteria to take this requirement into account, but more importantly,
they will need to develop training programs to increase the capabilities of their current
management and analyst ranks. A basic statistics program or a series of classes
in data analysis at a local college or university, for instance, could create a team of
highly motivated managers and analysts that could begin this transformation. Capital
One, the financial services firm, has created an internal training institute, Capital One
University, which offers a professional program on testing and experiment design,
for instance. With the right capabilities in place, organizations must align incentives,
structures, and workflows so that employees at all levels leverage insights derived
from big data. The UK retailer Tesco, for example, has developed a strong data-driven
mind-set from top leadership to the front line. It has integrated customer intelligence
into its operations at all levels from a variety of consumer-targeted big data strategies.
At Famous Footwear, the shoe retailer, the executive team meets with the testing
head every two weeks to discuss results and plan data gathering and evaluation
programs. At Amazon.com, it is said that Jeff Bezos fired a group of Web designers
who changed the company Web site without conducting experiments to determine
the effects on customer behavior. At all of these companies, big data and its most
powerful levers are an integral part of management dialogues and the organization’s
culture.

4. DEVELOP ENTERPRISE INFORMATION STRATEGY TO
IMPLEMENT TECHNOLOGY
To prepare for a big data world, organizations should develop an integrated data
strategy for the entire enterprise. Data models, architectures, and attributes of
solutions need to be considered holistically. Taking customer data as an example,
a common problem is for discrete business units, in silos, to develop their own data
strategies without planning to share or aggregate data across the organization. As a
result, organizations often discover that they do not even have a common definition
of their customers and attributes that apply across lines of business. Even within the
same business unit, such differences can occur. The lack of a customer-centric view
severely limits the organization’s ability to use any of the powerful big data levers to
create new value. An effective enterprise data strategy must include interoperable
data models, transactional data architecture, integration architecture, analytical
architecture, security and compliance, and frontline services.
Many organizations will require additional investment in IT hardware, software,
and services to capture, store, organize, and analyze large datasets. The level
94 Peter F. Drucker, Management challenges for the 21st century (New York, NY: Harper
Business, 1999).

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of investment will vary considerably depending on a company’s current state of
IT capability and maturity. IT leaders will need to assess and identify any gaps
in the technology their enterprise has available for effectively capturing, storing,
aggregating, communicating, and analyzing data. They will have to work with the
organization’s business leaders to develop business cases for new investments and
then prioritize that spending.
Despite the need for a comprehensive enterprise data strategy, it can often be helpful
to begin implementation on very targeted projects in order to learn what works and
to begin developing capabilities (see our recommendation about experimentation
in the section “Identify potential value creation opportunities” above). For example,
Kaiser Permanente in California initially concentrated on one IT project exclusively for
patients with long-term conditions by creating specific disease registries and panel
management solutions, rather than an all-encompassing IT solution that addresses a
range of problems. This led to much faster time to impact.

5. ADDRESS DATA POLICY ISSUES
Addressing privacy and security issues will become paramount as more data
increasingly travel across boundaries for various purposes. Privacy, in particular,
not only requires attention to compliance with laws and regulations, but also is
fundamental to an organization’s trust relationships with its customers, business
partners, employees, and other stakeholders. Certainly, organizations will need
policies that comply with privacy laws and any government privacy regulations.
But in developing a privacy policy, organizations will need to thoughtfully consider
what kind of legal agreements, and, more importantly, trust expectations, it wants
to establish with its stakeholders. And it will need to communicate its policies clearly
to its stakeholders, especially customers, as they become increasingly savvy and
concerned about what is known about them and how that information can potentially
be used.
As part of the enterprise data strategy, organizations will need to clearly define and
implement an enterprise risk strategy that includes all of their IT functions. This
strategy must include a thorough risk assessment of the enterprise that assesses
everything, from the likelihood of physical break-in, to the probability of hackers
penetrating a mainframe, but perhaps most importantly, the risks of people
with authorized access using that access for purposes that are counter to the
organization’s goals. There is a range of IT solutions (e.g., VPNs, intranet firewalls,
threat monitoring) that can help to manage data privacy and security risks.
Organizational leaders will also have to wrestle with legal issues relating to their
stance on intellectual property for data, how they will think about liability, etc. These
are topics that clearly require specialized legal counsel, but with an approach that
takes into account multiple considerations, including strategy, relationships with
customers, partners and employees, and technology.
  
Competing and capturing value using big data will require leaders to address specific
barriers across talent, technology, privacy and security, organizational culture, and
incentives to access data. It is urgent that organization leaders start identifying or
refining the role of big data in their business plans and start laying the enablers in
place to realize value.


6. Implications for policy makers

The value potential underpinned by the use of big data will not be realized unless
government and policy makers, in addition to leaders of individual organizations,
understand and respond to the range of barriers and enablers we have identified. Our
research has demonstrated that big data is not only a powerful engine of competition
and growth for individual companies, but that, in aggregate, it also can move the
needle on productivity, innovation, and competitiveness for entire sectors and
economies in both the developed and developing worlds.
Forward-thinking policy makers will keep pace with the development of big data
and find timely solutions to the barriers that today stand in the way of capturing
its full value. Action may be required at both the national and international levels if
policy makers are to help organizations make the most of the big data opportunity.
Just as we are seeing early evidence of firms skilled at using big data pulling ahead
of their competition, the use of big data could play a substantial role in country
competitiveness.
Policy makers must consider the choices they should make in order to help
individual firms in their economies capture value out of using big data. The major
areas where policy can play a role are building human capital (e.g., improving
the supply of graduates knowledgeable about big data and easing immigration
restrictions); aligning incentives to ensure access to data; addressing privacy and
security concerns; establishing intellectual property frameworks; overcoming
technological barriers to data; and promoting information and communication
technology infrastructure. Government policy makers in many economies are already
addressing, or at least discussing, these areas. This is a task that they must start
to address with some urgency. Without appropriate rules, laws, guidelines, and
incentives, the economies that are less progressive in these areas will risk being at a
competitive disadvantage to those that appreciate the dynamics and value potential
of big data.

1. BUILD HUMAN CAPITAL FOR BIG DATA
Governments can act in a variety of ways to help increase the supply of talent
necessary to leverage big data. First, governments can put in place education
initiatives to increase the pipeline of graduates with the right skills. In the United
States, for instance, there is a push at the federal, state, and local levels to support
more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Most
other OECD governments also recognize the need for more STEM graduateswho
are historically underrepresented in those fields, including women. However, the
needs for deep analytical talent are more specific even than this—more graduates
with advanced training in statistics and machine learning (a subdiscipline of computer
science) will be necessary. A second way for governments to increase the supply
of talent is to reduce barriers to accessing these pools in other regions, i.e., through
remote work or the immigration of skilled workers.

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The challenge of developing a large number of organizational leaders and analysts
in business, government, and the social sectors who have basic understanding
of analytical techniques is on a far larger scale. At a minimum, new knowledge
workers already in the educational pipeline on their way into the workforce should be
educated on these topics; a mandatory course in statistics/decision science, with
a module on experimental design, should become part of the curriculum in fields
such as business administration and other management disciplines. But waiting for
a whole new generation of graduates will be insufficient. Government could create
incentives to train existing managers and analysts in these techniques.
We also discovered in our research that detailed national workforce data about
knowledge workers, by occupational category and industry, was difficult to find
outside of the United States (including roles requiring deep analytical skills, as well
as management and analyst roles, amongst others). Several countries could provide
very detailed data about manufacturing-related occupations (e.g., “precious metal
forging”), but had very broad categories for knowledge workers (e.g., “bankers”).
Based on the principle that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure,” policy
makers in these countries could direct their labor statistics agencies to begin
collecting more detailed data about employment in knowledge worker categories
(ideally, in standard categories that would allow cross-country comparisons). This
data would better inform their decisions about how to develop human capital, i.e.,
knowledge workers more generally, and for big data-related positions specifically.

2. ALIGN INCENTIVES TO PROMOTE DATA SHARING FOR THE
GREATER GOOD
One of the most important enablers of value creation from big data is combining
data from multiple sources. But in many cases markets for data have not yet
been developed, or there are market failures for the sharing or trading of data.
Governments can play an important role in creating the conditions for the functioning
of effective markets, including setting rules related to intellectual property, the
arbitration of disputes, and so on. For example, the requirement to create health
information exchanges in the US health care sector is designed to ensure that
sanitized clinical data can be shared across providers so that the system can fully
utilize data on the comparative effectiveness of treatments.
Where there are market failures, such as a lack of self-interested incentives for a
particular stakeholder group to make its data available, policy makers might have
to apply the lever of regulation to ensure that data are shared. For example, there
is tremendous reluctance to release data that expose errors (e.g., doctor or pilot
mistakes) because of the reputational risk it poses for providers.95 But government
has a clear interest in making sure that these data are shared because doing so
is one of the key enablers for reducing systemwide risks from such mistakes.
Mandating the collection and release of such data might become necessary. For
example, governments might require public companies to provide financial data
in standardized electronic form. In the wake of the recent global financial crisis,
many governments already take the view that considerable improvement in the
transparency of financial reporting is necessary to mitigate systemic risks to the
financial system.

95 For example, airline pilots might not necessarily like the fact that cockpit voice and data
recorders can reveal errors they make while flying, but release of data from these devices to
safety agencies after an accident is mandatory in order to improve the safety of the overall
system.


In the public sector, where lack of competitive pressure limits efficiency and
productivity, transparency can be a powerful tool. Openness and sharing of big data
can be a critical lever and enabler of improved performance. Increasingly, policy
makers require government agencies to intensify their measurement of activities and
programs and then display that information in ways that are easily accessible to the
public. This not only gives agencies tools for better management, but also it gives
the public a way to hold the agencies accountable and gauge their performance in a
quantifiable way. That public pressure can act as a significant incentive for agencies
to improve performance, reduce costs, and boost productivity.

3. DEVELOP POLICIES THAT BALANCE THE INTERESTS OF
COMPANIES WANTING TO CREATE VALUE FROM DATA AND
CITIZENS WANTING TO PROTECT THEIR PRIVACY AND SECURITY
Although tremendous value, including consumer surplus, can be unlocked through
the use of big data, the fact remains that many citizens are suspicious about the use
of highly personal information. Citizens will continue to want their privacy rights clearly
articulated, and businesses need to be able to know—and be able to anticipate any
changes in—what data they can and cannot use. In some cases, markets for personal
information could develop, but in other cases, traditional market mechanisms might
not suffice to develop practices that protect privacy and security.
In the future, the effective design and enforcement of privacy laws will be critical not
only for protecting customers, but also for providing assurance that the value of their
consent to share data will far outweigh the potential risks. One challenge for policy
makers will be to keep pace with big data developments, such as those involving fastdeveloping personal location data. Of course, governments, nonprofit organizations,
and the private sector will need to develop education programs so the public can fully
understand how much personal information is available, where and how it is used,
and whether individuals are willing to allow this usage.
Most developed countries already have agencies that are responsible for creating
and enforcing guidelines and laws concerning commercial and individual data
privacy in general. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission, for instance,
uses its Fair Information Practice Principles as a guideline for dealing with security
and privacy issues. Along the same lines, the OECD has issued guidelines on the
Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, while the European
Union has its Data Protection Directive. All of these guidelines and laws contain
similar elements of reporting and protection. Germany has a federal commissioner
who actively monitors industry for data protection compliance. South Korea’s Data
Protection Act is enforced by two separate government agencies.
In parallel, businesses and governments will almost certainly want strong laws
prohibiting hacking and other security invasions to protect their own operations as
much as possible, and they will want effective enforcement of those laws. Protecting
critical IT infrastructure is important both to ensure that organizations can access
and use data securely, and to safeguard national security, as cyber attacks become
increasingly sophisticated and bold. For instance, cyber attacks against portions of
a country’s financial infrastructure (e.g., credit card processing facilities) can result in
the release of sensitive personal information about millions of individuals and loss of
trust in electronic markets.

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4. ESTABLISH EFFECTIVE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
FRAMEWORKS TO ENSURE INNOVATION
We will undoubtedly continue to see many innovations emerging along the data value
chain in the age of big data. Innovative technology to better generate and capture
data will emerge. Advances in storage and analytics will continue as organizations
increasingly need to store ever greater amount of data, access and analyze them,
sometimes in near real time. These innovations require an effective intellectual
property system, which will both ensure incentives for creating valuable data and
enable the effective sharing and integration of different pools of data. There will be
increasing demand for more effective and efficient means of establishing intellectual
property rights (e.g., copyright and patents) and adjudicating disputes.

5. ADDRESS TECHNOLOGY BARRIERS AND ACCELERATE RD IN
TARGETED AREAS
Policy makers can play a role in helping to overcome technology issues related to
the use of big data, from facilitating the development of standards and guidelines
regarding IT tools or data pools, to encouraging RD in critical areas where gaps exist
today.
Standards covering IT tools or certain types of data are critical so that data can be
shared to create the necessary scale to enable the kind of analytics that create value.
These standards can emerge from industry standard-setting bodies, but government
can play an enabling role. For example, in the US health care arena, the Standards
and Certification Criteria for Electronic Health Records (EHR) to be issued by the
Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology will identify
the standards necessary for certification of EHR technologies so that medical
professionals and hospitals are assured that the system they adopt can perform as
required.
Policy makers can also accelerate big data research. Government can directly
sponsor basic research. For example, the U.S. National Science Foundation funds
programs in both computer science and mathematics, while the EU has put in
place the Research Framework Programme, designed to be the main instrument
for coordinating and allocating research funding in science and technology areas in
Europe.
Governments can also consider how to deploy incentives, e.g., tax expenditures
or other financial support, to help overcome technological barriers to leveraging
big data. Sometimes, there is a mismatch between who must make a technology
investment and who will receive the benefits of that investment. For instance,
in US health care, providers are the primary investors in electronic medical
record technology, but the benefits felt in the form of optimized health care go
disproportionately to payors and patients. The American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009 provided some $20 billion to health providers and their support sectors
to invest in electronic record systems and health information exchanges to create the
scale of clinical data needed for many of the health care big data levers to work.


6. ENSURE INVESTMENTS IN UNDERLYING INFORMATION AND
COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY INFRASTRUCTURE
For organizations to leverage large datasets, basic infrastructure needs to be in place
from electricity grids that power information technology to communication networks
that enable data to travel. Judging from the approaches we observe in different
countries, the spectrum of possible policy interventions to encourage infrastructure
to be built and maintained can vary significantly.
Many countries have created specific incentives and initiatives targeted at expanding
infrastructure. For example, the US government has put in place a number of
monetary incentives to encourage the build-out of broadband infrastructure (e.g.,
rural broadband project) and the implementation of electronic medical records. The
US government has also proposed a far-reaching national wireless development
program that involves a voluntary incentive auction to free up spectrum as well as
wireless spectrum reallocation, with the goal of covering 98 percent of the country
with 4G high-speed accessibility. Other governments also are taking action to foster
competition in infrastructure markets to drive down costs to end customers and to
broaden access. South Korea, for instance, is providing subsidies for broadband
subscription by certain groups (e.g., low income) but, like Japan and some European
countries, explicitly requires broadband providers that own the network to share the
facilities at a fee.
In the years ahead, policy makers should make infrastructure an explicit part of their
approach to big data.
  
Policy makers can play a vital enabling role to ensure that organizations make the
most of the potential of big data in the key areas of talent, RD, and infrastructure, as
well as to foster innovation in this dynamic arena. Some of the policy action that they
can, and should, take will involve practical nuts-and-bolts moves that take effort but
are not controversial. The more complex task will be ensuring that legislation strike
the right balance between freeing organizations to use data to the significant extent
they need in order to capture its full potential, and assuaging fears among the public
about compromising privacy and personal security. This is a balance that requires
thoughtful consideration and one that policy makers should not shy away from
addressing.

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Appendix

Construction of indices on value potential
and ease of capture
From our analysis of big data in five domains, we reached a sense of what
characteristics indicate higher or lower value potential from the use of big data to
capture value from its use, as well as higher or lower barriers in realizing that value in
different sectors. Using these insights, we created two indices: (1) an index on value
potential, and (2) an index on the ease of capture. Each of these indices comprises
multiple criteria which give us a relative sense of which sectors may be poised for
greater gains and which sectors would face the toughest barriers. We do not claim
that these indices give a full picture, but we believe that they give a good sense of both
the potential value available and the ease or otherwise of its capture across sectors.

VALUE POTENTIAL INDEX
The five criteria we use in this index act as a proxy for how well a sector can benefit
from one of the five transformative opportunities we have discussed in this report
(Exhibit A1):
1. Amount of data per firm. The larger the amount of data per firm, the more it
indicates that a firm is likely to be able to benefit from increasing transparency in
terms of data. We used the storage available per firm as a proxy. We built upon our
data mapping analysis to estimate the available data storage, in bytes, in 2009 in
each sector in the United States. We then divided that by the number of firms with
more than 1,000 employees (to avoid skewing the numbers by the large number of
small businesses and individual proprietors).
2. Variability in performance. The higher the variability, the more it indicates a firm
can benefit from the use of data and experimentation to expose variability and
improve performance. We used the variability in EBITDA (earnings before interest
tax depreciation and amortization) as a proxy. Within each sector, we took the
EBITDA of major companies (with greater than $500 million in sales) from 2002 to
2007 and identified the 10th and 90th percentile EBITDA. The difference between
the top and bottom performers became the variability we measured.
3. Customer and supplier intensity. The more customers and suppliers a firm
has, the greater its potential to apply segmentation to tailor courses of action.
We used the number of frontline employees (defined as those who interface with
customers or suppliers) per firm as a proxy. We used data from the US Bureau of
Labor Statistics to identify the number of frontline employees (major occupations
include Standard Occupation Classification codes 41 such as sales clerks and
agents, and 43 such as administrative workers) in the latest year available. We
then divided by the number of firms with more than 1,000 employees
4. Transaction intensity. The higher the transaction intensity, the more likely the
sector can benefit from the use of automated algorithms to augment or replace

123

124

human decision making. We used the amount of processing power of an average
firm in a sector as a proxy. To arrive at a relative sense of processing power, we
used capital stock data for PCs and mainframes by sector from the US Bureau
of Economic Analysis and divided by the number of firms with more than 1,000
employees in each sector.
5. Turbulence. Turbulence, or how frequently leaders and laggards in a sector
change place, is a proxy for the amount of innovative disruptions to which a
sector is susceptible. We hypothesize that the higher the turbulence, the greater
the likelihood that a sector will benefit from the use of big data to innovate
business models, products, and services. Within each sector, we calculated the
turnover percentage—the number of new companies placed in the top 20 ranking
in 2011 compared with 2006, divided by 20.
Once we quantified each criterion (the proxy), we gave each sector a score of from
one to five based on the quintile into which it falls into for each criterion. The overall
value potential index is the average of the scores across the five criteria.
Exhibit A1
MGI has compiled a heat map of
the value potential of using big data
across sectors
Categories

Sectors

Overall
value
potential
index1

Top quintile
(highest potential)

4th quintile

2nd quintile
3rd quintile
Amount
of data
per firm

Bottom quintile
(lowest potential)
No data available

Customer
Variabili- and
Transty in per- supplier action
formance intensity intensity

Turbulence

Manufacturing

Goods

Construction
Natural resources
Wholesale trade
Information

Services

Retail trade

Regulated
and public

Government
Utilities


EASE OF CAPTURE INDEX
This index is made up of four criteria, each of which aligns with a key barrier to the use
of big data that we have identified (Exhibit A2):
1. Talent. The more deep analytical talent a firm has, the better a position it is in to
realize value from big data. We divided the number of deep analytical talent in
2008 by the number of firms with more than 1,000 employees in each sector.


125

2. IT intensity. The more IT assets a sector has on average, the lower the technology
barriers to be overcome. We calculated IT stock using data from the US Bureau
of Economic Analysis and divided that total by the number of firms with more than
1,000 employees in each sector.
3. Data-driven mind-set. This indicates how receptive the organization is to using
big data to create value. We leveraged the latest survey results conducted on IT
strategy by McKinsey’s Business Technology Office, which asked leaders the
degree to which their organizations make decisions based on experience and
opinions or based on data.
4. Data availability. We use the relative number of databases related to each sector
in a proprietary corpus of data as a proxy for how accessible data is in a sector.
Again, once we quantified each criterion (the proxy), we gave each sector a score of
one to five based on the quintile into which it falls for each criterion. The overall ease of
capture index is the average of the scores across the four criteria.

Exhibit A2
across sectors
Categories

Sectors

Overall
ease of
capture
index1

Top quintile
2nd quintile

Bottom quintile

3rd quintile

No data available

Talent

Manufacturing

Goods

Construction
Natural resources
Wholesale trade
Information

Services

Retail trade
Regulated
and public

4th quintile

Government
Utilities


IT intensity

Data-driven Data
mind-set
availability

126

Data map methodology
Several research groups have studied the amount of data that enterprises and
individuals are generating, storing, and consuming in studies that have used various
definitions and scopes (Exhibit A3). However, there are no insights available thus far
about the variations among sectors. For this reason, we undertook a brief modeling
exercise to estimate the amount of data generated and stored in different sectors,
both on an aggregate basis and on a per firm basis.
To estimate the amount of data generated and stored in aggregate, our model relies
on four key inputs and assumptions:
1. Annual storage capacities shipped by sector. We used industry reports from
IDC and Gartner that provide the total number of bytes shipped each year in
external disks, including storage area networks (SAN), network attached storage
(NAS), and direct attached storage (DAS). These data are available by sector and
by selected geographies.
2. Average replacement cycle of storage. We used a McKinsey estimate for
the average replacement cycle of storage. This allowed us to estimate the total
available (cumulative) storage in a given year.
3. Utilization rate. We used a McKinsey estimate of the average percentage
of storage utilized at a given point. This allowed us to estimate the amount of
incremental data capacity used (also referred to as “new data stored” in our
report) in a given year.
4. Duplication rate. For security and other reasons, every piece of data is often
stored multiple times (e.g., for backup, recorded in different systems for a variety
of uses). McKinsey specialists provided us with an average estimate that allowed
us to estimate the amount of “unique” data generated and stored in a given year.
We applied a similar approach to estimating the amount of data generated and stored
by consumers. In this case, we included key devices that store content genuinely
generated by users, namely solid-state disk and hard disk drives in PCs, notebooks,
and certain electronics. We did not include consumer devices and storage
components such as DVDs, CDs, and digital video recorders that predominantly
contain content that users have not generated (e.g., generated by media companies).
Our estimates are in line with results from previous research. Our estimate of
7.4 exabytes of new data stored is most comparable to the 25 exabytes of data
storage capacity estimated by Hilbert and López for server and mainframe hard
disks.
We extended our analysis to a per firm level in the United States, where data on the
number for firms are most readily available. We took the estimated available storage
capacities, as well as new data stored, for different sectors in the United States, and
divided by the number of firms (with more than 1,000 employees) in the corresponding
sectors. Data on the number of firms came from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and
Dun Bradstreet. We chose to include only firms of at least medium size—i.e., those
with more than 1,000 employees.


127

Exhibit A3
How MGI’s estimate of the size of big data compares with previous
external estimates
What was measured
MGI storage-based
approach

IDC/EMC1 Digital
Universe

UCSD

Amount of data

Year of estimate

▪ New data stored in enterprise external

▪ 7.4 x

▪ For 2010

▪ New data stored by consumers in a year

▪ 6.8 x 1018 bytes

▪ Annual digital data captured (includes all

▪ ~800 x 1018 bytes

▪ For 2009

▪ 3.6 x 1021 bytes (total

▪ For 2008

disk storage in a year

▪
▪

▪ Includes both digital and analog data for
▪

Hilbert, López

generated, stored or not)
Includes more than 60 types of devices
Did not include information consumption
by users through TV, video gaming1

TV, radio, phone, print, computer, comp.
games, movies, recorded music, etc.
Measured data from consumption
perspective2

▪ Capacities for specific technologies

▪

–
–
–
–

Server and mainframe hard disks
Other hard disks
Digital tape
PC hard disk
Total digital storage capacity

1018 bytes

(includes replicas)

consumption US only)

▪
▪
▪
▪
▪

24.5 x 1018 bytes
6.49 x 1018 bytes
32.5 x 1018 bytes
123 x 1018 bytes
276 x 1018 bytes

▪ For 2007

1 Includes chip cards, floppy disks, camera, video games, mobiles, memory cards, media players, CDs, DVDs, Blue Ray disks,
PC and server hard disks.
2 Consumption is defined as the data each time used by the user.
SOURCE: IDC white papers on Digital Universe, sponsored by EMC; Bohn and Short, How Much Information? 2009: Report on
American Consumers, January 2010; Hilbert and López, “The world’s technological capacity to store, communicate,
and compute information,” Science, February 2011; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

Estimating value potential in health care (United States)
In our analysis of big data in US health care, we focused on levers or initiatives where
large datasets are a necessary precondition for creating value—but are often not
sufficient by themselves to generate any value. We concede that, in most cases,
the realization of value requires significant structural changes including legislative
adjustments, new incentives, and reimbursement schemes, as well as overcoming
barriers such as privacy concerns.
We define long-term potential as value that can be captured in a ten-year period
in a scenario that assumes sufficient structural changes are made. Some of the
levers may overlap with other health care information technology initiatives and
proposed health care reforms although we explicitly excluded value accruing from
the pure implementation of IT. For example, we did not include the time doctors and
nurses save from using electronic medical records and therefore being able to avoid
handwriting charts and storing and retrieving charts on paper. At the same time, we
included savings from reducing overtreatment (and undertreatment) in cases where
analysis of clinical data contained in electronic medical records was able to determine
optimal medical care.
To estimate the value potential of each of the big-data-enabled levers that we have
identified, we used a tailored approach based on key drivers. These drivers typically
include (1) base numbers, such as the number of hospitals, patients, clinical trials,
or cost per base number for which we tended to use the latest year figure available;
and (2) the breakdown of impact between, for instance, cost reduction, and increase
in time to market. In estimating the potential impact of big data, we used US and
international case studies with reported impact numbers wherever possible. In the
remaining few cases, we relied on expert interviews. We know that several factors
need to come together to generate value; nevertheless, we have assigned the full
value of the identified levers to big data because it is not possible to break down

128

impact among contributing factors. We did, however, select case studies or expert
estimates, on which we base the impact numbers, in a way that minimize any double
counting of impact across the big data levers.
We scaled impact numbers from individual case studies appropriately to ascertain
the impact on a sector or system-wide level and then on national health care
expenditure. We assumed some fundamental complementary transformations
such as nationwide adoption rates of enabling technologies (e.g., about 90 percent
adoption of hospital electronic medical records) and structural changes (e.g.,
potential provider consolidation or formation of accountable care organizations).
Although our estimates of the potential value released by big data assume some
fundamental complementary changes, our estimates remain within the range
of estimates made by researchers in academia, think tanks, and government
(Exhibit A4).
To calculate the impact of big-data-enabled levers on productivity, we assumed that
the majority of the quantifiable impact would be on reducing inputs. We held outputs
constant—i.e., assuming the same level of health care quality. We know that this
assumption will underestimate the impact as many of our big-data-enabled levers are
likely to improve the quality of health by, for instance, ensuring that new drugs come
to the market faster and patients receive optimal treatment.
Focusing on quantifying the productivity impact from efficiency savings, we then
added the total potential across levers, excluding those where savings may not have
any impact on overall national health care spending. We then projected those total
savings forward and divided that total by future projected health care spending. The
annualized rate is our estimate of the productivity impact of big data in health care.
Exhibit A4
CER and CDS were identified as key levers and can be valued based on
different implementations and timelines
Estimated annual lever impact, $ billion

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) to evaluate drugs benefits, define optimal
treatment pathway, and to use as a basis for reimbursement/coverage decisions
0

CBO: Impact of increasing funding Commonwealth Fund, 2007:
AHIP/PwC, 2009: Walker et al., Health Affairs, 2005:
for CER over short term
CER for insurance benefit design long term
Level 4 HIEI implementation

80

37

1

46

20
4

NICE variability reduction applied to US outpatient, inpatient and drug expenditure, midto long-term

13

NICE variability
reduction applied to drug
costs, mid- to long-term

77

79

Clinical decision support (CDS) system based on electronic medical records including computerized
physician order entry (CPOE) to improve efficiency and quality and reduce duplication
0

Johnston et al., J. Healthcare Information
Management, 2004: Reduction of ADEs,
better compliance with guidelines

CBO: reduction of administrative overhead and
adverse events on federal budget, short-term
3.4

7.5

80

44

17

31

Benchmarks on reduction in malpractice cases, ADEs, never
events, reduced duplications of tests and procedures

SOURCE: Congressional Budget Office; PwC Health Industries; Walker et al., “The value of health care information exchange
and interoperability,” Health Affairs, 2005; Johnston, Pan, and Walker, “The value of CPOE in ambulatory settings,”
Journal of Healthcare Information Management, 2004


Estimating value potential in public sector administration
(European Union)
To size the value potential of big data levers in European public sector administration,
we drew on government operational and budget data (at aggregate and at
department levels) and McKinsey’s internal public sector expertise and took a microto-macro approach in our analysis.
First, we identified big data levers and quantified their potential to create value by
focusing on two specific agencies—tax and labor—that are prototypical examples
of administrative functions. We estimated the potential impact by drawing on
best practices found around the world. Next we extrapolated the impact of the
identified levers to a country’s entire government by identifying other addressable
subdepartments, and applying the potential improvement found in our agency-level
analysis to the addressable portion, adjusted by relevance. Finally, we scaled up our
estimates at the country level to all OECD economies in Europe.
We found three categories of benefits from the use of big data in public sector
administration:
1. Operational efficiency savings. We applied the percentage of potential
operational cost savings to estimated addressable European OECD government
expenditure (net of transfers).
2. Reduction of cost of fraud and errors. We applied the percentage of potential
fraud reduction to estimated addressable European OECD government
transfer payments by multiplying the percentage of transfer payments. The
estimated addressable transfer payment took into account the percentage of
transfer payment that has a non-negligible amount of fraud and error and the
estimated percentage of the cost of fraud and errors.
3. Increase in tax revenue collection. We applied a percentage potential reduction
in the tax gap to the estimated European OECD government tax gap.
For the purposes of our analysis, we used the latest year of consistent government
spending and taxation revenue data from the OECD.
We then translated monetary potential into productivity estimates. We define
productivity as the amount of output produced in relation to the level of inputs
required to produce that output. Improved productivity comes from both reducing
inputs (given a fixed level of output) and increasing the quality or quantity of output
(given a fixed level of input).
The productivity of the public sector is difficult to measure for two main reasons. First,
many sectors don’t have quantifiable output (e.g., national security). Second, even
in sectors where outputs are evident, measurement is of limited usefulness without
an assessment of whether those outputs add value to citizens and how that value
changes over time.
From 1969 to 1994, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics experimented with productivity
measures for key government functions but discontinued this effort because of
budget cutbacks. In the United Kingdom, the Office of National Statistics responded
to the Atkinson review in 2003 by establishing a Center for the Measurement of

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Government Activity that has begun to produce a productivity index for some parts of
government.
In the absence of established methodologies for measuring public sector
productivity, we approximated quality-adjusted outputs using tax revenue and total
inputs using total budget/spend. In our model, tax revenue was the only improved
outcome, and we assumed that other outcomes such as the number of people put
back to work were not affected.
In our methodology, annual productivity growth is the sum of annualized percentage
increase in tax revenue and the annualized percentage decrease in total government
budget. While this is a rough methodology, we believe that our estimates are
reasonable as they are within the same range of other comparable estimates
(Exhibit A5).
Exhibit A5
Productivity estimates: Public sector administration
Annual productivity growth
%
“Micro to
macro”
analyses from
deep dive

0.7

Tax agency

0.3

Labor agency

0.5

Public sector administration

Comparisons
with other data
points

US public sector efficiency
potential1
Adoption of IT/online services
at Job Centre Plus2

0.5

0.9

1.4

1.2

IT contribution in private
sector3

1.7

1 Dohrmann and Mendoca, “Boosting government productivity,” McKinsey Quarterly.
2 P. Dunleavy, Innovating Out of a Recession, seminar, London School of Economics, London, June 2009.
3 Oliner and Sichel “Information Technology and Productivity: Where Are We Now and Where Are We Going,” Federal Reserve
Bank of Atlanta Economic Review, 2002

Estimating value potential in retail (United States)
To arrive at estimates of the value created by big data for retail firms, which we
then extended to estimate a total value estimate for the whole sector, we used a
combination of client case studies, academic and industry research, and interviews
with experts.
Starting with our estimate of the potential value created at the level of individual firms,
we used a model that depends on four key drivers (Exhibit A6).
1. Subsector cost structure archetypes, which gives us the various cost buckets as
a percentage of sales. We used US Census Bureau data and McKinsey analysis.
2. Estimates of impact by individual levers, expressed as a percentage reduction
on a cost bucket or percentage increase in volume or price (Exhibit A7). We used
extensive interviews with McKinsey experts drawing on their client experience, as
well as published case studies.


131

Exhibit A6
Retail: Diagram of model showing the impact of levers
Inputs

Intermediate calculations

Outputs

Subsector cost
structure archetypes

Variable sensitivities

% Revenue
Lever

Subsector

Subsector
Lever

X

% Op. margin

Max lever impact on
output variables

X

Subsector lever
relevance scores

% Cost savings
Lever

Subsector

Lever

Subsector

Subsector sales data

$ Cost savings

X

Subsector
Lever

Max lever % rev
impact assumptions


Exhibit A7
The impact of levers on labor productivity
Category

Big data lever

Productivity impact

Improved cross-selling

~100% cancellation to first order

In-store behavior analysis


Customer micro-segmentation


Sentiment analysis

Marketing


Location based marketing


Enhanced multi-channel exp.
Merchandising
Operations

Supply
chain
New bus.1


Assortment optimization

Sales: Assume all top-line levers
cancel out in the long run (e.g.,
enhanced marketing will not
create significant net sales at an
industry level)


Pricing optimization


Placement optimization


Performance transparency

Take employee hours reduction

Labor resource optimization

Take employee hours reduction

Improved inventory mgmt

Take as cost savings

Distribution optimization


Informing supplier negotiation


Price comparison services

Price reduction leads to no impact

Employee hours: Some levers
will reduce employment hours
Operating margin: Levers will
improve margins through lower
costs

Consumers may use their savings to purchase additional
retail good/services or spend it in other industries
1 Impact of Web-based markets is difficult to quantify and we have excluded this from our calculations.

3. Subsector level lever relevance heat map that tells us the relative relevance
of a lever in a particular subsector. Levers have different potential for different
subsectors either because they have different degrees of relevance or because
subsectors will already be operating with varying degrees of big data maturity.

132

4. Subsector sales that allow us to calculate not just the percentage impact on
margins but in absolute dollars. We used a combination of estimates from the US
Bureau of Economic Analysis, US Census Bureau, and Moody’s.
Our firm-level analysis tells us the potential impact of an individual retailer that adopts
the big data levers, relative to competitors that do not.
To extend our firm-level analysis to the sector-wide level, we calculated potential
productivity gains conservatively using those levers specific to operations and
supply chains, for instance, that reduce costs. This is because we believe that any
nominal sales increase gained by individual firms are unlikely to accrue to gains in
total nominal sales across the whole of the retail sector, given that consumers’ total
retail spending is primarily influenced by overall economic growth. We agree that this
means that our estimate is likely to be conservative. Nevertheless, our estimates of
a 1 to 2 percent productivity gain assuming all efficiency levers are pulled and a 0.5
to 1 percent excluding the impact of the sourcing lever (which assumes no net effect
when suppliers are also pulling the same lever) are comparable to the range of IT
impacts on the productivity of nonfarm sectors in general (Exhibit A8).
Exhibit A8
Following this approach leads to significant labor productivity compound
annual growth rates from the implementation of big data levers
Big data labor productivity improvements in the US retail industry over next 10 years
Compound annual growth rate, %
All cost reduction
levers

All cost levers
except sourcing

IT improvement
from the 1990s

1.0–2.0

Assumes all big data cost-reduction
levers become industry standard
Assumes other industries also
adopt “big data” levers (i.e., the
“sourcing” lever for retail is offset by
the “pricing” lever for suppliers)

0.5–1.0

1.0–2.0

Overall productivity improvement
for from IT in the 90s for the whole
economy was ~1–2 percent

SOURCE: Jorgensen, Dale, Ho, and Stiroh, “A retrospective look at the US productivity growth resurgence,” Journal of
Economic Perspectives, 2008; McKinsey Global Institute analysis


133

Estimating value potential in personal location data
(global)
For this case study, we drew on McKinsey’s macroeconomic and industry expertise,
external academic research, and market forecasts, as well as extensive findings in
the available literature. By looking at the value chain of location-based applications,
we examined both the amount of data generation and the potential to create value.
We estimated the amount of personal location data generated in each category of
application or source device and in different geographic regions using the installed
base of devices, usage behavior, and the frequency with which data are generated.
To assess the potential value that data can generate, we scrutinized the major
applications of personal location data and estimated the economic value of each
application to end users—individual consumers, enterprises, and government
organizations. While we have sized each of the identified applications or levers,
we know that our total value potential estimate will be conservative, given new
applications or levers will emerge in the future that we cannot predict today.
The underlying model and inputs used to measure economic value varied for
each application. Take personal navigation applications as an illustration of our
approach. We measured potential economic value through the metrics of time saved
and reduced fuel consumption due to the use of classical navigation and “smart”
traffic-enabled navigation. Inputs included the outcome of experiments in Western
European cities, extrapolated globally based on rates of GPS adoption, driving
behavior, and a congestion index calculated using the density of population and
vehicles on available road infrastructure across all regions (Exhibit A9).
Exhibit A9
We have introduced a regional congestion index based on city/area
population density and vehicle density
Input parameters

Output indicator

City/area population
density distribution

Regional congestion index
Africa
Oceania
Canada

Regional vehicle density (vehicle/motorway km)
31

China

64

48
25

Western Europe

21

12

14

13

Latin
America

Rest of
Asia

Eastern Europe
US

Western
Europe

Eastern
Europe

Congestion level vs.
population density

Japan

China

India

45

San Francisco

40

Los Angeles

Chicago

35

Japan

New York

Latin America

30

Cincinnati

25

India

Milwaukee

20

Rest of Asia

15
10
5

United States

Wichita

0
0

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

900

1,000

SOURCE: Eurostat; US Census; www.world-gazetteer.com; World Bank; McKinsey Global Institute analysis

134

Methodology for analyzing the supply and demand of
analytical talent
We focused primarily on analyzing the supply and demand projections of analytical
talent in the United States because of the availability of labor and education data at a
granular level. We did analyze the supply situation globally in selected geographies
where education data are readily available. In this appendix, we will first explain the
US analysis and then the global analysis.
US analysis
First, we analyzed the supply and demand gap for three types of big data talent in 2018:
1. Deep analytical talent—people with the advanced training in statistics and
machine learning who can analyze large volumes of data to derive business
insights.
2. Data-savvy managers and analysts who have the skills to be effective consumers
of big data insights—i.e., to pose the right questions for analysis, interpret and
challenge the results, and take appropriate decisions.
3. Supporting technology personnel who develop, implement, and maintain the
hardware and software tools needed to make use of big data including databases
and analytic programs (Exhibit A10).
Exhibit A10
Big data talent is grouped into deep analytical, big data savvy, and
supporting technology
Deep analytical
Definitions

Occupations1

Big data savvy

Supporting technology

People who have advanced
training in statistics and/or
machine learning and
conduct data analysis

People who have basic
knowledge of statistics
and/or machine learning
and define key questions
data can answer

People who service as
database administrators and
programmers

▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪

Actuaries
Mathematicians
Operations research
analysts
Statisticians
Mathematical technicians
Mathematical scientists
Industrial engineers
Epidemiologist
Economists

▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪

Business and functional
managers
Budget, credit and
financial analysts
Engineers
Life scientists
Market research analysts
Survey researchers
Industrial-organizational
psychologists
Sociologist

▪
▪
▪
▪
▪
▪

Computer and information
scientists
Computer programmers
Computer software
engineers for applications
Computer software
engineers for system
software
Computer system
analysts
Database administrators

These occupations comprise 61 occupations in the
SOC across 170 industries as defined by the North
American Industry Classification System (NAICS)
1 Occupations are defined by the Standard Occupational Code (SOC) of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and used as the
proxy for types of talent in labor force.

In the following, we will describe our methodology to project the supply and demand
for deep analytical talent, though we also applied a similar methodology to the
other two categories. We estimated supply and demand for deep analytical talent
separately. In both estimates, however, employment data from 2008, the latest year
for which complete data were available for analysis, serve as the base. We assume
that the labor market cleared in 2008 (i.e., 2008 employment data represent both the
supply and demand of labor).


We define people who have deep analytical talent as those with advanced training in
statistics and/or machine learning. To estimate the 2008 base of this class of talent,
we used US Bureau of Labor Statistics 2008 occupational employment data, making
the assumption that occupation is an adequate representation of talent. Using the
Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system (SOC code is in parentheses),
the occupations that we chose to represent deep analytical talent were actuaries
(15-2011), mathematicians (15-2021), operational research analysts (15-2031),
statisticians (15-2041), mathematical technicians (15-2091), mathematical scientists
all other (15-2099), industrial engineers (17-2112), epidemiologists (19-1041), and
economists (19-3011). For each of these occupational categories, we estimated
the percentage of people that would have the requisite deep analytical skills.
We estimated the supply of deep analytical talent in 2018 using the 2008 base plus
university graduates with relevant skills, plus immigration, minus attrition. We define
the skills that are relevant to deep analytical talent among graduates to be majors and
degrees that are consistent with SOC occupations. Using detailed statistics about
US university graduates, we chose estimated ratios of graduates with bachelor’s and
master’s degrees and doctorates in the following majors that have the relevant deep
analytical skills: computer and information sciences, mathematics and statistics,
engineering, physical sciences and science technology, biological and biomedical
sciences, social sciences, and business.
We used two separate approaches to estimate the demand for deep analytical
talent in 2018. The results of these two approaches are consistent. We based our
first and more detailed approach on the current model used by the BLS. Demand
for deep analytical talent in 2018 is driven by the growth of industries that employ
these people and the share of this talent employed by these industries, estimated
by the percentage of each occupation within a sector that are serving in a deep
analytical capacity.
To simplify our model, we define industries using the North American Industry
Classification System and group them into low, medium, and high data intensity
according to their data storage capital stock per firm with 1,000 or more employees.
We take this approach because we assume that industry demand for deep analytical
talent will differ significantly according to how much data an industry generates
and stores. For example, finance, a high-data-intensity sector, is likely to have more
growth in demand for deep analytical talent.
In a world in which all big data levers are actively deployed by organizations across
the economy, our first model assumes that all sectors will increase their demand
for deep analytical talent at the fastest rate projected by BLS through 2018 in their
respective group of industries according to data intensity. For example, in the highdata-intensity group, Internet services are projected to have the highest growth of
deep analytical talent through 2018; thus we model other sectors in the high-dataintensity group to experience the same rate of growth as that of Internet services.
The second model we used is a firm-based demand model, which assumes that
demand for deep analytical talent is driven differentially according to three main
industry groups: financial and insurance industries (FIG); online (Internet service
providers, Web search portals, data processing and housing services); and all
other industries. This assumption reflects our interviews with industry leaders
that suggested that FIG and online industries will require significantly more deep
analytical talent per firm than those in other industries. We estimate the number of
people with these skills needed in each industry group based on the number of firms

135

136

in each employment size class and the expected number of deep analytical talent
required per firm (differs by employment size class). The numbers of firms by industry
are estimated using the Statistics of US Business (SUSB), the US Census, and Dun
Bradstreet.
Global analysis
We estimated the number of graduates with deep analytical talent in the United
States internationally training in other countries using Euromonitor data on graduates
by major by degree as well as data from local statistics offices where Euromonitor
data are not available. We apply the ratios of US graduates to maintain consistency
with the US estimate.
Key data sources
Data description

Data sources

Occupational employment

US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)

Occupational employment projection

US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)

Numbers of public and private firms by
employment size

Statistics of US Businesses (SUSB)

Numbers of public firms with 1K+
employees by industry

Dun Bradstreet (DB)

Net capital stock by type

US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA)

Numbers of university graduates in the
United States

National Center for Education Statistics,
IPEDS Data Center

Numbers of university graduates globally

Euromonitor


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143

Angus Greig

Relevant McKinsey Global Institute publications

Clouds, big data, and
smart assets: Ten tech-enabled
business trends to watch
Advancing technologies and their swift adoption are upending traditional business
models. Senior executives need to think strategically about how to prepare their
organizations for the challenging new environment.

Jacques Bughin,
Michael Chui, and
James Manyika

Two-and-a-half years ago, we described eight

information technologies are deployed are chang-

technology-enabled business trends that were pro-

ing too, as new developments such as virtualization

foundly reshaping strategy across a wide swath of

and cloud computing reallocate technology costs

industries.1 We showed how the combined effects

1 James M. Manyika, Roger P.

Roberts, and Kara L. Sprague,
“Eight business technology
trends to watch,”
mckinseyquarterly.com,
December 2007.

2Two of the original

eight trends merged to form a
megatrend around distributed
cocreation. We also identified
three additional trends
centered on the relationship
between technology and
emerging markets,
environmental sustainability,
and public goods.

and usage patterns while creating new ways for

of emerging Internet technologies, increased com-

individuals to consume goods and services and for

puting power, and fast, pervasive digital communi-

entrepreneurs and enterprises to dream up viable

cations were spawning new ways to manage talent
and assets as well as new thinking about organizational structures.

business models. The dizzying pace of change has
affected our original eight trends, which have continued to spread (though often at a more rapid pace
than we anticipated), morph in unexpected ways,

Since then, the technology landscape has contin-

and grow in number to an even ten.2

ued to evolve rapidly. Facebook, in just over two
short years, has quintupled in size to a network

The rapidly shifting technology environment raises

that touches more than 500 million users. More

serious questions for executives about how to help

than 4 billion people around the world now use

Advancing technologies and their swift adoption are upending traditional
business models. Senior executives need to think strategically about how to
prepare their organizations for the challenging new environment.

their companies capitalize on the transforma-

cell phones, and for 450 million of those people

tion under way. Exploiting these trends typically

the Web is a fully mobile experience. The ways

August 2010
Clouds, big data, and smart assets:
Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch

doesn’t fall to any one executive—and as change

March 2010
The Internet of Things
More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to
communicate. The resulting new information networks promise to create new
business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks.

Artwork by Harry Campbell


Accounting for the cost of US health care:
A new look at why Americans spend more
December 2008

December 2008
Accounting for the cost of US health care:
A new look at why Americans spend more
The United States spends $650 billion more on health care than expected, even
when adjusting for the economy’s relative wealth; MGI examines the underlying
trends and key drivers of these higher costs. MGI finds that outpatient care,
which includes same-day hospital and physician office visits, is by far the largest
and fastest-growing part of the US health system. The next largest contributors
are the cost of drugs, and administration and insurance.
October 2002
How IT enables productivity growth
Looking at three sectors in detail—retail banking, retail trade, and
semiconductors—MGI finds that while IT enabled productivity gains in each
sector, its impact was complex and varied. IT applications that had a high impact
on productivity shared three characteristics: They were tailored to sector-specific
business processes and linked to performance levers; they were deployed in
a sequence that allowed companies to leverage their previous IT investments
effectively; and they evolved in conjunction with managerial innovation.

US Productivity Growth
1995-2000
Understanding the contribution of
Information Technology relative to
other factors

McKinsey
Global
Institute
With assistance from our Advisory Committee
B. Solow, chairman, B. Bosworth, T. Hall, J. Triplett
Washington, DC
October 2001
This report is copyrighted by McKinsey Company, Inc.; no part of it
may be circulated, quoted, or reproduced for distribution without prior
written approval from McKinsey Company, Inc..

October 2001
US productivity growth 1995–2000: Understanding the contributions of
information technology relative to other factors
MGI’s study of US productivity growth aimed to determine the causes of the
sudden increase in the growth rate of labor productivity in the United States
between 1995 and 2000. This increase was interpreted by key economists and
policy makers as evidence of a “new economy,” where IT applications would lead
to faster US economic growth. The report lays out the nature and importance of
the role played by six key sectors in the acceleration of productivity growth and
its causes, with a focus on the role of IT.

www.mckinsey.com/mgi
eBook versions of selected MGI reports are available on MGI’s Web site, on
Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, and on Apple’s iBookstore.
Download and listen to MGI podcasts on iTunes or at
www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/

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