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Big Data Innovation Summit:
Unlocking the Value of Big Data
Anthony J. Scriffignano, Ph.D
SVP Worldwide Data & Insight
Dun & Bradstreet
April 9, 2014
ダンアンドブラッドストリート
Headquarters location:
40° 44' 30.0192'' N
74° 21' 35.8128'' W
斯格非亚诺 博士 (安东尼)
2014年4月9日

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Clearly, Big Data is central to the strategic thinking of today’s innovators and
business executives. Companies are scrambling to figure out the secret to
transforming Big Data to Big Insight and that Insight into Action.
As many companies struggle with the emerging technologies and nascent
capabilities to discover and curate massive quantities of highly dynamic data, new
problems are emerging in the form of how to ask meaningful questions that
leverage the “V’s” of large amounts of data (e.g. volume, variety, velocity, veracity).
In the Business-to-Business space, these challenges are creating both significant
opportunity and ominous new types of risk.
In this session, D&B’s SVP of Worldwide Data & Insight, Dr. Anthony
Scriffignano, will discuss how companies are reacting to these changes and provide
valuable insight into new ways of thinking in a world with overwhelming quantities
of data.
Session abstract…

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The imperative for transforming Big Data into Big
Insight is central to B2B evolution, allowing us to
turn insights into action
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Our customers continue to ask more
difficult questions and expect innovation to
outpace their need
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1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010
Private fixed investment – IT
equipment & software has
become an increasingly
important component
Our response as an industry has been
predictable, but incomplete

6.
Pope Benedict Inauguration
Sometimes, a picture is worth a
thousand words.
Pope Francis Inauguration
• What about the digital footprint of
all of the smartphones?
• What about the social networks
the crowd?
• What about the metadata in the
photos?
• What are the opportunity costs to
other activities?
• The largest corpus of data preceded
the event
• Most data created about the event
had significant, and asymmetric
latency
• The rate of “data decay” attributable
to the participants in the event is
significant
Lately, a thousand pictures are taken in
the time it takes to speak a single word!
The nature of Big Data itself is changing through
human and digital “learning”

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The fundamental
problem of
identifying and
understanding a
business is
something we do
well.
That problem is made much more complex when the
“crowd” is doubling and doubling in size.
“There will be a shortage of
talent necessary for
organizations to take
advantage of big data. By
2018, the United States alone
could face a shortage of
140,000 to 190,000 people
with deep analytical skills as
well as 1.5 million managers
and analysts with the know-
how to use the analysis of big
data to make effective
decisions.”
McKinsey & Global Institute Report
“ Big data: The next frontier for
innovation, competition, and
productivity” June, 2011
Business problems such as credit decisioning are
much more complex as the “crowd” is changing

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30 years ago we were in search of basic tools
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• Lack of transactional data resulted in
surveys, surveys and more surveys
• Human and Digital latency was an
accepted part of the analytic landscape
• Storage and computing power were
severe limitations (remember the days
of megabytes or sharing a PC with
other team members?)
• Analytic methods – descriptive at best
• … fragmented views of the truth that
lacked foresight in most cases

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30 years later these issues have been
addressed, giving rise to others
• Transactional data overwhelming problem formulation, increased
reliance on tools vs. methods
• Storage and processing power – our head is now in the clouds
• Analytic capabilities that can allow us to filter, determine casualty
and be both prescriptive and proscriptive
• New capabilities to understand the character and quality of data
in ways that were never before possible
• …. However we are still struggling to get to a complete view,
determine causality and to transform our understanding into
foresight and action
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10.
• We all know that the world is changing
• We are aware that the rate of change is increasing at
an unprecedented rate
• We see new types of data, technologies, and behaviors
every day
The Operating Environment
• What has made us successful so far is insufficient
• We now have the ability to succeed… or fail, much faster
• The connectedness of information and the ways in which it is
changing is impacting the risk and opportunity space in ways
we are only beginning to understand
The Case for Change
The case for change is a compelling one

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We must learn to ask questions in new ways
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12.
Data Data Data DATA!It’s not just about DATA!
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Math Math Math MATH!It’s not just about MATH!
It’s about making
better business
decisions
Where to invest?
How do to
optimize sales &
marketing
investments?
How to target
better?
How to minimize
my risk?
How to manage
world class
supply chain?
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Relationships matter

15.
Put simply, there are three levels of insight
required along a journey to informed perspective
I See You
Global Data
Completeness
I Know You
Multi-Lingual
Identity
Resolution
I Can Predict
Your Behavior
Predictive
Analytics
Transparent Relationships
Insight for Decisions
“I need integration of assets and
transactional data.”
“I need foundational
business insight.”
“I need predictive insights
on-demand.”
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Leveraging new data sources provides a
complete transparency of a business relationship
which enables actionable insight
Complete
Transparency in
Business
Relationship
Propritary
Business
Activity
Signals
3rd Party
Business
Activity
Signals
Logistic –
Shipping &
Delivery
Spend &
Purchasing
Transaction
Data
Real Estate
Transactions
&
Ownership
Social Media
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Innovating and expanding data
collection will result in:
 Linking together relationships
between trading partners to see a
complete supply chain
 Identifying the “heartbeat” of a
business, predicting its future
health, and rapidly seeing changes
 Deeper insight based on signal
patterns to anticipate the future
behavior of a business
 Understanding the true size of a
business in multiple dimensions,
including social influence beyond
its balance sheet

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Traditional
Size Attributes
Number of
Employees
Sales
Revenue
New
Data Sources
Proprietary
Data Signals
Untraditional
Size ‘Proxies’
Data innovations are radically enhancing
our predictive analytic power, such as new models
for assessing size dimensions
Multi-dimensional Size Assessment
• Comprehensive
• Multi-faceted
• Contextual
• Representative
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0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10Marketing Composite Score
Total Loss Viability
Physical
Delinquency
Influential
Financial
MCS
Illustration
SIZE
RISK
3 SIZE Measurements
trending over time
+
3 RISK Measurements
=
1 POWERFUL Score
New strategies exist for risk-reward tradeoffs such
as multi-dimensional marketing attributions
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Commercial signals and proxy are now added to
existing predictive attributes to provide deeper
insights and even more predictive analytics.
Signal & proxy sources
add significant
decisioning content on
small businesses with
limited or no traditional
predictive data footprint

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Leveraging signals gives rise to the ability to
predict the likelihood a material change in a
company’s profile will occur in the next year
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Advanced
Analytics
Activity Signals
Behavioral Trends
Event Frequencies
Changes in Traditional
Data Sources
Anticipatory
Analytics
Risk
Profile
Change
Opportunity
Profile
Change

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Advanced analytics can identify businesses that
are poised for growth, and anticipate customers’
progression across the business lifecycle
Businesses can be
thought to have stages of ‘size’,
like caterpillars growing into butterflies
Starting up
Going Public
Growing Physically
and Financially
Going Global
Foresight into future needs enables
you to take the best action at the best time
Egg
Caterpillar
Molting Larva
Pupa
Emerging Adult
Adult
Engage Here
High probability of
growth in near future
Act Now
Indication a major business
transition lies ahead
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Virtuous
Cycle
Teach &
Learn
Inform
Focus on Creating an Informed Perspective for Customers
The winning hand is to incorporate science
into workflows in a systematic way….
Develop
foundational
knowledge
Integrate
assets
including
Transactional
Data
Establish
complete
and intimate
knowledge of
customers and
prospects
Transform
insights
into action
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With vast amounts of data come great
opportunity… and new types of risk
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As we continue this work, we are also mindful about how
the nature of data is changing…
It is easier than ever to
start a new business –
geographic location,
existing infrastructure, and
physical customer
interaction are becoming
irrelevant.
…However, ALL OF THESE
ATTRIBUTES HELP
RESOLVE BUSINESS
IDENTITY.
As the ability to provide
“helpful” information
proliferates, the truth can get
lost.
As information is increasingly
unstructured or imbedded in
applications and private spaces,
the lines between what is public
and what is discernable are
blurred.
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Source: USA Today

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The Internet
• Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t
make it true…
• Significant effort exists to manipulate what
we “find,” that capability can be exploited or
simply used with negligence
• Everything isn’t on the internet!
Veracity
• Repetition doesn’t necessarily mean truth
• Repetition doesn’t necessarily mean truth
• Bad news travels fast
• Bad guys are often “smarter” than good
guys
• Truth can only be measured against a source
of the “truth”
Latency
• Everything is not simultaneously true
• Newer information isn’t always more true
Relationship
•Correlation is not causation
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In the above use-case, with millions of payment
experiences a week,
we were able to quickly identify and analyze a
suspicious pattern and take action
Not only on all related cases but also the “three ring
leaders”
Some thoughts on veracity…

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Some thoughts on volume…
• There are multiple considerations for Volume
• Moving from data in hand to discoverable data
• Discovery leads to curation and synthesis
• Multiple technologies are available from cloud to in-house, but must consider
existing footprint
• Consider the skillset of resources available
• Volume is dynamic
• Monotonicity
• Persistence
• Ubiquity
• Security and access
• Volume must also be considered as an opportunity cost
• More data requires different approaches to processing
• Big “O” considerations for prospecting and analytics

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Some thoughts on variety…
• There are multiple considerations for Variety
• The myth of “unstructured” data
• Disambiguation and entity extraction
• Neural networks and other methods for inferring ontology and relationship
• Deep learning, heuristics and automata
• Variety is constantly evolving
• New data types are being created out of necessity
• The “hidden” web and other sources of data
• The impact of language and orthography
• Evolution of encryption and transformations
• Variety leads to unique challenges for processing
• Measuring and sampling
• Bias introduced by different types of data
• Unknown “met” needs

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Macro
Regional
Local
Micro
Global
Association
Entity
People in
Context
Connected
Supply/Value
Chains
Mal-
feasance
Disaster
Remediation
Material
Changes
Challenging the Status Quo: There are many frames to
consider when delivering an answer

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“And now we welcome the new year,
full of things that have never been” –
Rainer Maria Rilke
We must embrace information that is rich, varied, and
full of opportunity and shift our focus from “hunting and
gathering” to new opportunities beyond just “Big Data”

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The
informed.
future belongs to
Follow the conversation at:
@dnbUS
@Scriffignano1
Visit us at:
www.dnb.com
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