I’ve been wondering recently about big data and small business. No one can avoid the statistics around the importance of small business to the U.S. economy: as Forbes noted not long ago, there are almost 28 million small businesses in the U.S., and more than 50% of the working population (120 million individuals) works in a small business.
But is there value for big data in a small business? Writing in Forbes earlier this month, Mike Montgomery specifically opined that small businesses shouldn’t fear big data. His advice for getting started is really no different than that big businesses should use – know the problem you’re trying to solve, start small – but small businesses may have an advantage in that they’re probably looking at a smaller universe of queries and are focusing on specific problems. But before you can be great at something, you have to be good. So starting small isn’t a drawback.
Data consultant Bernard Marr promoted that point in Business Standard earlier this month, noting, “In many ways, big data is suited to small business in ways that it never was for big business – even the most potent insights are valueless if your business is not agile enough to act on them in a timely fashion. Small businesses have the advantage of agility, making it perfectly suited to act on data-derived insights with speed and efficiency.”
Also within the last month, consultant Kevin Tully, writing at Smart Data Collective, offered some good news for small businesses regarding big data: “Believe it or not, if your company has been operating for a year or more, you likely have a ton of “Big Data” sitting in your company records. If you’ve been keeping track of your sales in a ledger of some sort (excel, QuickBooks, etc.), then you have an excellent set of sales statistics to cross-reference with other information in your tool chest.”
Marr also noted another advantage for small business related to big data: “Huge datasets on everything from demographics to weather and consumer spending habits are freely available online – if you know where to look. Plus, the basic tools to make sense of the data are also free and becoming increasingly simple for anyone to use.”
That buttresses a point I made a few weeks ago about the increased interest in big data and the cloud, and Marr expanded on it in a Forbes piece last month on big data as a service: “At the moment, BDaaS is a somewhat nebulous term often used to describe a wide variety of outsourcing of various Big Data functions to the cloud. This can range from the supply of data, to the supply of analytical tools with which to interrogate the data (often through a web dashboard or control panel) to carrying out the actual analysis and providing reports.”
Simply put, that means small businesses have access to big data in the same way they have access to big infrastructure through Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or any other IaaS provider. In the same way they can now lease processing power, they’re no longer locked out of taking advantage of big data because of their size. According to this Business News Daily article from late last year, they can start with Google Analytics and move onto other business intelligence providers. There’s also a raft of public sector sources, which data scientist Ben Wellington used earlier this year to find the worst parking spot in New York City.
It’s never too soon for small business to start thinking big.
