How Big is Your Data?

Every few years new buzz words arrive that tend to be thrown around an awful lot, whether they practical or not. One of the current buzz words is “Big Data”. Almost every day I get emails inviting me to some sort of “Big Data” conference. Amazon is always offering me recommended books on “Big Data”. And in my day to day business dealings I have heard very smart people use the term way too literally to describe almost anything. But as a business owner or organizational leader, is this something you really need to worry about? “Big Data” involves millions or billions of records or data points. Unless you are Amazon, Google, the National Hurricane Center or utilizing Oracle across multiple CPU’s with advanced clustering, then you probably need not worry about “Big Data.”

But that is not to say that you shouldn’t be using data to drive all of your decisions. I would like to suggest that the majority of business owners and organizational leaders that want to improve their performance and improve their ability to compete consider “Small Data.” This is the easy to gather and access data that will let you improve workflows, measure return on investment, reduce uncertainty and gauge effectiveness by keeping score. “Small Data” is the hundreds and thousands of data points, metrics and indicators that are readily available to quickly contribute to your business results, measure your progress and forecast future results.

At Data Science Solutions we are all about helping your organization improve by utilizing “Small Data”.

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