Partner Article

Big Data: A New World For Small Businesses

When you think of business intelligence, do you automatically envision huge, multinational businesses tracking millions of rows of sales and revenue data? Or do you think about the independent cafe on your local high street, keeping track of which menu items are selling best on any given day?

Traditionally, the business intelligence industry was built to serve large companies that had the means and resources to accommodate a full suite of software and teams of statistical analysts. However, the last decade has seen the paradigm shift as the big data buzz has trickled from the world of IT into the everyday lives of society.

Small businesses are increasingly waking up to the advantages that data driven insight can bring, recognising they need to see and understand their data to be able to compete with their larger rivals.

Thankfully, the industry has evolved. Software has become easier to use and deploy and are increasingly accessible to smaller firms. Indeed, recent research estimates that in the past three to five years, about one-third of small enterprises, and over 20 percent of mid-sized businesses have used business intelligence products.

For small and medium-size businesses seeking to implement a more data driven culture, here are some key tips:

1. Find a business intelligence solution that can equip anyone to be a data analyst.

Big data is only valuable when anyone and everyone who needs it can access it, and, crucially, understand it. In the past, the only business intelligence option was inflexible and complex. These tools required some programming knowledge to use, serving as a barrier to their adoption by small businesses.

Fortunately, good data analytics solutions are being created that do not require any coding expertise for building dashboards and exploring data, enabling practically anyone to ask questions of their data - without the help of an IT or team of data analysts.

For a small business where one person wears many hats, it’s about making data analytics easy to use, yet powerful enough to slice and dice data to find insights. The new breed of software brings together data analytics and graphic design so that people can easily visualise what the data is telling them.

2. Speedy insight is crucial.

With the old model of business intelligence, companies often relied on teams of data scientists to crunch numbers and generate reports. Coupled with slower, less-powerful software, the data analytics process could take weeks. Thankfully, this is no longer the case.

For instance, take Lucky Voice, a UK based karaoke chain as an example to sing about. Like many small and medium sized firms, its director performs many roles, from researcher and analyst to manager. By implementing self-service data analytics software across the business, Lucky Voice has been able to completely change the way the business is run, by finding quick answers to simple questions, such as how many people are booked into our karaoke bars next week? What drinks and food do they prefer? Which are the most popular songs to perform?

With visual analytics software, answers to these and a multitude of other questions are accessible at the click of a button, in an easy to use format - whereas this kind of decision making was previously based primarily on instinct. As a result, the managing director has been able to focus his energy on the job at hand and redeploy hard-pressed development resources away from compiling reports into creating new services and growing revenues.

3. Make data visual.

As the human brain is wired to process information visually, we are much faster at spotting trends and identifying correlations or outliers when we actually see visual representations of data.

Making visualisations is one of the best ways to explore and understand data, particularly when presenting data and reports to customers, investors or other stakeholders. Find a solution that makes visualisations simple to format and insight easy to absorb, whether it’s through a map capturing geographic information, height variations within a bar chart or a trend line aggregating millions of data points.

4. Rely on the cloud but not exclusively.

Small business owners should implement business intelligence software that’s flexible, easy to deploy and can be tested with low investment, preferably one which allows them to work both in the cloud and with data on premises. Adopting a cloud solution has major benefits: There is less infrastructure to deploy, the security is top notch and accessibility is near universal. Yet at other times, an on-premises solution may make more sense. For instance, if you have concerns about broadband speed and access.

Small businesses need to make data-driven decisions at the speed of thought and the solution should be flexible enough to facilitate that. The best option might be a hybrid solution that doesn’t restrict you from relying fully on cloud computing and that also allows for storing data on premises.

Business intelligence does not need to be overwhelming or difficult for a small business. By following some simple steps, companies of all sizes can harness the power of analytics to improve their bottom line.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James Eiloart .