Own a small business? Big Data can help.
Often when big data is discussed
it is associated with large corporations such as Facebook or Twitter using it
to better meet the needs of their customers. This makes many people think that
big data analysis is only for big businesses which is simple not true. No
matter how small your company is big data analysis can help you rise above your
competition in all aspects of your company. This blog is intended to provide
some of the ways you can use big data analysis to help your business become
better.
Many of the software packages
used for big data analysis can be used to monitor company performance and help
keep track of every aspect of your business. Many of these programs are free
and easy to find using a simple internet search. I know that learning a new
program can often be very challenging but with the wide spread use of websites
like YouTube most of these tools have tutorials already made on how to use
them. Often looking at the numbers in a chart really doesn’t provide you with
the true picture of how your company is progressing but these tools will help
display your data into easy to understand graphs.
If your company is try to become
a lean company then big data analysis can help. Analyzing your data can point
out the keep points in processes that are taking extreme amounts of time to
complete. Once these processes are found they can be made better or automated
to reduce wasted time. This in turn will
save money for your company and help protect your company from going out of
business.
Analyzing your own data isn’t the
only way to help your business though. With many people posting their every
move on social media sites these days an abundance of data is available for anyone
to use. You can analyze this data to find out what items people are buying the
most and where they shop. For example, if you are in the food business but don’t
seem to be as busy as many other similar restaurants in the same city then
searching through Facebook could quickly point out why these people are going
there instead of to your location. This could be because the other places are
offering specials that you don’t currently have or just simply that they don’t
know you exist in which case you could start advertising more. This will also
provide you with information about what you are doing great on if people comment
about their experience while visiting your restaurant.
If interested about how big data
could help your small business check out some of the following websites for a
little more information:
Big Data for Small Enterprise:
Painful, But Worth It
For a small business I think the easiest way to handle with a big dataset is to check the association between the products. As Dr Megahed introduced in the class, this procedure is called as Association Rules. The most typical example of association rules is “market basket analysis” which is a modeling technique based on the idea that if one buy a certain group of items, then he/she is more likely to buy (or not to buy) another group of items. The discovery of this type of associations may provide important opportunity for market managers to develop more effective marketing strategies. For example, with this procedure we can calculate what percentage of customers buying sugar also buy eggs.
ReplyDeleteChris,
ReplyDeleteIn addition to Ahmet's comments, I believe another relevant post can be found at: http://auburnbigdata.blogspot.com/2013/02/analysis-of-big-data-by-twitter-and.html
I think it is an intriguing topic; however, one would have to think that the way big data can help has to be based on the type of business. A small engineering start-up vs a newly opened family restaurant would have very different needs.
It would be very interesting to see whether the existing architectures that claim to assist small business can accommodate for such variability.
Fadel