By Robert Reiss

In his book "Managing in the Next Society," Peter Drucker explains the nature of transformation. The Industrial Revolution of the 1820s occurred 40 years after James Watt's steam engine; and the railroad concept pioneered in 1829 became transformative in the 1860s, setting the stage for national expansion in America.

We are now witnessing a new transformation in the very fabric of what every successful company has in common – satisfied customers. The entire customer experience as we know it will be transformed by a new revolution … the revolution of big data. And perhaps the greatest difference between the winners and losers of business over the next decade is that the winners will utilize the powerful engine of big data.

First let's define big data. In the simplest terms, the reason it's called big data is because of two new elements 1. no-SQL data utilizes parallel processing instead of sequenced processing, which dramatically escalates speed, and 2. non-structured data includes blogs, emails, web logs, voice streams and social media etc., which when added to traditional structured data dramatically escalates data volume.

So while many believe social media is the game changer, in truth social media is just the appetizer of the big data banquet. Companies now have real-time speed potential and mind boggling amounts of every piece of personal preference information on customers. Smart companies will be able to capture significant business in two ways...

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