Fundamentals of Management, 11/e

How is big data changing the way managers make decisions?

Big Data Today

• Amazon.com, Earth’s biggest online retailer, earns billions of dollars of revenue each year—estimated at one-third of sales—from its “personalization technologies” such as product recommendations and computer-generated e-mails.53

• At AutoZone, decision makers use software that gleans information from a variety of databases and allows its 5,000-plus local stores to target deals and hopefully reduce the chance that customers will walk away without making a purchase. AutoZone’s chief information officer says, “We think this is the direction of the future.”54

• It’s not just businesses that are exploiting big data. A team of San Francisco researchers was able to predict the magnitude ...