Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

LITTLE DATA

Little data is our term for anything not considered big data. Although big data is in vogue, little data sources are just as crucial for successful business analytics and answering the critical business questions. If we refer back to Exhibit 4.1 and our Customer Knowledge Model, we can see very quickly that multiple “little data” sources and types are required for a company to operate business analytics in a customer-centered manner. For example, the voice of the customer feedback is a must for understanding the attitudes of your customers, monitoring industry and market developments is essential for you to understand the context under which your customers make their buying decisions, and analyzing customer demographics and buying patterns is key for segmentation and predictive modeling. The trend in many companies that successfully leverage business analytics is the integration of different types of data across the enterprise. To this end, expect that as you lead with business analytics, you may need to understand and integrate unfamiliar data sources and types in order to have the most positive impact on your organization.

As you begin to take stock of the data across your enterprise, it’s important to outline the different types of data (“big” and “little”) that are needed to address your chief business objectives. As a way to spur your thinking, in the next exhibit we briefly outline some of the data types you might consider making part of your business analytics ...