The Benefits of Being a Small Fish in the Sea of Big Data

If you read up much on the world of big data, you can quickly get the idea that it’s only for the big guys. The most notable examples are evident in Fortune 500 companies and giants like Google and Twitter. But that’s misleading, because any size business can take advantage of the rich insight produced by big data analytics. In fact, in many ways the small business has an advantage over the big fish in the sea when it comes to responding to trends and insight produced by data analytics. Here are the ways that your small business is better off in the waters of big data.

Small Businesses are Agile and Can Act on Insight Quickly

The small business doesn’t have as many ties that bind. They are able to change direction or alter their momentum, whereas the big companies are essentially stuck in their usual patterns of operation.

Large companies are not able to respond to many insights that big data unearths, because their business models, product lifecycles, and other issues are pretty much set in stone. Making broad sweeping changes requires much time and many levels of approval, not to mention redistribution of funds. In fact, most market trends would have come and gone before the average large enterprise would be able to respond and make suitable changes.

The small business, on the other hand, is able to make necessary changes to their plans quickly and easily, without the hassle of having to go through layers and layers of approvals and budget requests. Hence, big data can make a more profound impact on the small business and can help guide the business as it grows and develops, so that the business is well-founded according to where the market is heading for the future. This means that small businesses that are molded and shaped from early on might be in a better position over the long term than the big guys.

Small Businesses Tend to Take Advantage of Inexpensive and Readily Available Third Party Resources

Often, the larger organizations are expected (and expect of themselves) that they are market and industry leaders. Most wouldn’t dream of buying third-party data or purchasing someone else’s analytics or even hiring an outside firm to manage their big data initiatives. With exceptions like the Twitter Firehose, which most organizations do invest in, they are on their own. Small companies have no such compunctions about using third-party data or help. This means that they can take advantage of a wide range of resources, likely uncovering better insights than any single organization could derive from solely their data sources.

Small Businesses Can Make Use of Small Data

Enormous data sets of many petabytes aren’t the only resources for insight and analysis. Small data has a lot to offer. It’s easier to manage and much cheaper than big data, too.

For all the hype and revelries, big data doesn’t own the patent on the delivery of insight. Small data is also useful and beneficial, and for certain purposes can actually be more helpful than the big stuff (not to mention the fact that small data is far easier to store, manage, and analyze). Small data is excellent for identifying market trends and for improving customer service and relationships. Small businesses that shy away from the daunting task of undertaking big data can still reap generous rewards from a small data initiative that big business would likely overlook with their deep data reservoirs and healthy wallets.

Small Businesses Can Take More Care to Assure Data Quality

When dealing with massive numbers of customers, products, and other variables, it is simply impossible to assure a high degree of data accuracy. Big business sacrifices accuracy to achieve a high enough volume of data as to be statistically relevant. Small businesses with a limited number of customers and products to manage can actually manage their data cleansing and can achieve a higher degree of data accuracy, that is a better quality of data, than the big folks can.

If you are a small to midsize business looking to learn more about what big data can do for you, then you won’t want to miss Big Data Week! Keep up with all the action on the Big Data Week website and follow us on Facebook and Twitter!