Big Data Less Accessible for Small and Mid-Size Businesses
October 31, 2017
Even as the term “Big Data” grows stale, small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) are being left behind in today’s data-driven business world. The SmartData Collective examines the issue in, “Is Complexity Strangling the Real-World Benefits of Big Data for SMB’s?” Writer Rehan Ijaz supplies this example:
Imagine a local restaurant chain fighting to keep the doors open as a national competitor moves into town. The national competitor will already have a competent Cloud Data Manager (CDM) in place to provide insight into what should be offered to customers, based on their past interactions. A multi-million-dollar technology is affordable, due to scale, for a national chain. The same can’t be said for a smaller, mom and pop type restaurant. They’ve relied on their gut instinct and hometown roots to get them this far, but it may not be enough in the age of Big Data. Large companies are using their financial muscle to get information from large data sets, and take targeted action to outmaneuver local competitors.
Pointing to an article from Forbes, Ijaz observes that the main barrier for these more modestly-sized enterprises is not any hesitation about the technology itself, but rather a personal issue—their existing marketing employees were not hired for their IT prowess, and even the most valuable data requires analysis to be useful. Few SMB’s are eager to embrace the cost and disruption of hiring data scientists and reorganizing their marketing teams; they have to be sure it will be worth the trouble.
Ijaz hopes that the recent increase in scalable, cloud-based analysis solutions will help SMB’s with these challenges. The question is, he notes, whether it is too late for many SMB’s to recover from their late foray into Big Data.
Cynthia Murrell, October 31, 2017
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