Demystifying Data: How Small Businesses Can Leverage Big Data for Business Growth

Breaking Down Big Data

Big Data is a nebulous concept, but nonetheless, the buzzword is here to stay. We’re only at the beginning of the big data and intelligence era, as technology companies continue to build smart tools to help make sense of all the data that’s being generated, but big data and intelligence will continue to permeate throughout all industries and at every level of business.

So to better understand Big Data, here are some basic facts:

1. It’s developing at a high velocity and generated by multiple sources—people, tools, machines.
2. Data is expected to grow to 40 zettabytes by 2020, that’s 50-fold growth since 2010! (Hence the name, Big Data!)
3. Majority of data generated is unstructured: it is generated content that has value, but it is yet to be organized and defined in a way that current technology can process and represent or interpret it in a meaningful way for the user
4. Most companies estimate they're analyzing a mere 12 percent of the data they have, according to Forrester Research (News - Alert). (via InformationWeek)

All businesses are generating and collecting data; whether it is sales transactions from the cash register, email exchanges from customers, website traffic and activity, or in-product user behavior interactions. What growing businesses need to recognize is that their data transformed into intelligence can drive huge business value.

Gaining the Competitive Advantage with Big Data

In a study produced by Harvard Business Review, it was found that data-driven companies performed better than those in the same industry. 

Companies in the top third of their industry in the use of data-driven decision making were, on average, 5 percent more productive and 6 percent more profitable than their competitors. 

Transforming big data into intelligence is simply about seeing the existing data in a new and meaningful way to help you strengthen your business, performance, productivity or relationships. Big data and intelligence will not erase the need for human insight or vision, but intelligence will drive better decisions about your business and enable you to move with more agility and stay competitive in the market.

How to Leverage Big Data

With the explosion of data, companies have started building smarter tools and software to organize and analyze the data to make it intelligible and actionable for users. Depending on how you want big data to work for you, here are some tips to approach how small business should be approaching big data for their business:

1. Know what matters: Define what is important to your business and recognize which data sources and/or metrics would be key to filter out from the noise of all the data that is out there.
2. Take small steps toward big data: You can easily get overwhelmed with the amount of data that your business collects. Prioritize the “need to know” intelligence from the “good to know” intelligence. (This goes back to knowing what matters for your business!) Then collect, analyze and refine the process.  Once you are comfortable seeing the data, you can expand your dashboards and intelligence-gathering for larger initiatives.
3. Get into habit: When facing business decisions, start asking, “What does the data tell us?” Create a culture where data becomes part of the discussion and decision-making; questions on why a certain data set may not be available may also lead you to realize more important metrics that you may not have considered before.

What Should You Look for in a Data Product?

Many companies are building smart tools and data products to manage the huge amount of data that is being created by consumers, customers and businesses and making the data actionable and insightful for the end user.  So while there are many great solutions out there, consider these key product qualities that will make up a successful data product for your business:

• Automatic – automation saves your team from manual processes but also eliminates bad data inefficiencies
• Intuitive – while the technology might be industry-disruptive, it shouldn’t disrupt your day-to-day operations. A great product will be intuitive, and should be augmenting your workflows or insights into your business
• Collaborative – different teams and stakeholders involved in the business should have visibility to the same data so that you can drive same smarter decisions while all on the same page
• Intelligent – intelligence data is really about seeing the information in a new way that is actionable and productive. A smart tool should be identifying and helping you to work more efficiently so that you can augment your efforts.
• Accessible – your data insights should be accessible from anywhere, anytime so that you can take action or make smarter decisions, wherever you’re working.

About the Author: Tim Fletcher is VP of Product at RelateIQ