How Small Business Can Utilize Big Data

Big data has traditionally only existed in the domain of large enterprises who have used data insights to make smarter business decisions likewise increasing their bottom lines.

For the average small business, the process of capturing, storing, extracting and analyzing large quantities of data is daunting and has always required far too many IT resources and expertise. This has changed.

The fact that SMBs do not want to maintain servers, hire data scientists or pay for expensive analytics suites does not mean they cannot benefit from business insights hiding in their own data.

Power BI is Microsoft’s new business analytics service designed to help SMB’s uncover valuable insights to make more informed decisions about their business.

According to Oluwamuyemi Orimolade, communications Lead, Microsoft Nigeria, There is no doubt that cloud technology is of huge benefit to small business because it provides the advantages of large-scale IT without the cost and complexity. Power BI is a good example of exactly how the cloud is leveling the technology playing field for businesses of all sizes.

“Assuming a small online retail shop in Nigeria wants to run a flash sale on a certain product to a specific set of customers. To do this effectively they need to have access to data that depicts their customer set to gather demographic information, online traffic that shows their most active customers, likely times to buy and historical sales data that shows them what worked well and what didn’t with the last flash sale they ran.

“Rather than searching each data set in its respective location and digging through everything manually, they could view all the information in one simple dashboard that illustrates trends and easy-to-spot insights, enabling fast and informed decisions about when to run the sale and who to market it to.”

“Business insights and intelligence are useless if a company is not flexible and agile enough to act on them with speed and efficiency. Small business have the advantage of being nimble and best of all, small business owners don’t need to learn a whole new set of skills or become a data scientist to use Power BI,” Orimolade Added.

Learning what competitors were up to used to be difficult to achieve. However, big data allows access to huge amounts of up-to-date information about other companies and other relevant data in your industry or region.