In a globalised, competitive marketplace, small and medium businesses may have even more need for the insights provided by Big Data.
By the myBusiness techblog team
In the past 15 years, the Internet has levelled the playing field for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Today, small businesses can run an online shop front and rival the big boys in terms of reach. The marketplace also feels smaller, as everyone from your distributors to rivals, is now reachable online.
The next big question is whether Big Data can supercharge an SME. It’s already being used by corporations to gain insights into how they can retain customers. For example, corporations can predict how to save fuel on airplanes by finding better waiting patterns around airports.
Can SMEs benefit from Big Data in the same ways?
What is Big Data?
First, there’s a need to understand what Big Data is and what its limitations are. The term ‘Big Data’ refers to the massive amount of data that is generated by computers. This could cover computer systems running billing, to telecoms networking systems, to even human traffic as people move in and out of malls.
Businesses are keen to mine this stream of data, to predict and analyse trends that may show themselves through patterns. This idea has been around for years but what has changed of late is the availability of computing power and the much greater volume of information collected, thanks to a greater reliance on computers for business.
The magic, if the technology’s advocates are to be believed, is in putting lots of data together, linking up the relationship among the data sets and predicting the most likely scenario, say, for retaining a customer who has given feedback about a service.
Sometimes cutting-edge technology such as machine learning is used to detect such relationships when there is so much data collected and humans don’t see the links as easily. Computers, being fed information and instructions, can ‘see’ links that we often miss out. They have a lot more processing power than us, after all.
The right data?
Yet, one issue that often comes up is the data itself. You might have the data, but its relevance and accuracy to the business question you want to solve may be wanting.
For SMEs, data accuracy tends be more of an issue than it is to large organisations, which have more documented processes in place. A common problem for SMEs is that years of dealing with customers and vendors can result in heaps of paperwork stored in physical and online folders that are disorganised. Worse, when staff leave, the insights they have learnt from processing or dealing with the data often walks out the door with them.
Another problem has to do with getting relevant data. This begins simply, for example, by collecting data from all the sources you have now.
This could be in the form of your customer relationship management (CRM) tools, which will give you insights on your clients’ main concerns. At the same time, you can get information on people that come from forms they have filled out at trade shows, and sales reports from company representatives.
Clear goals
With all the data sources identified, you’ll want to set a goal to pursue – what kind of insights and predictions do you seek.
You may want to ask questions such as
- how can your marketing department improve its messages by better understanding the people who are interested in your products and services online?
- Where do your customers come from, who are they and what particular products are they most interested in?
Compare your findings from processing the data with what you learn from face-to-face meetings with customers, for example, in other ‘touch points’ like your retail outlet. Look at what people are saying on social media, on your Facebook page. Does the actual feedback from people tally with what your analytics reports say?
The good thing about smaller set up is that you can actually start running a Big Data project and test things out quickly. Unlike big companies, leaner teams can also react faster to insights provided by Big Data and turn the ship around to better address business issues.
Ultimately, Big Data, like data mining and other corporate tools before it, is just a means to provide better business knowledge. The human element at the end—the decision making—still has to be spot on.