Enriched Data is the key, not Big Data

Big Data has been the “in-thing” for quite sometime now. The emergence has led to multiple technological breakthroughs and changed the way we think about storing and analyzing data. The fever has led to an extent where you might as well be living in the stone age if you are not perfecting the art of big data management in your organization. As a discussion in a LinkedIn group pointed out;

Big Data is like teenage sex: Everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it too.

Now, the question is; Do you need Big Data? The more appropriate question is; Can you afford it?

It is quite easy to develop a herd mentality and get into a maze of complex resource management for big data. Setting up a big data environment can become extremely expensive. The licensing costs alone will cost several thousand dollars a year. To add to the misery, many data aggregators have quite an unforgiving pricing structure. No use of paying through your nose if it is not mission critical.

So, what do you do? Focus on enriching your data.

To put it crudely, Big data means more rows. Enriched data means more columns. This might alarm some purists, but let’s carry on for now.The idea is to develop a way of thought, rather than indulging in rack-spaces.

Let’s take a small example. Say, have a sales data set with only two columns — Month & Year, Sales. The sole target is to enrich it. This is how you can do it,

• Get hold of your ad-spends data per month both offline and online -Columns — Month & Year, Sales, Offline Ad Spend, Online Ad Spend
• Find your operational metrics — No. of stock outs, costs. Columns — Month & Year, Sales, Offline Ad Spend, Online Ad Spend, Stock-outs Count, Operating Costs
• Add industry data — Median sales, Highest Sales, Lowest Sales. Columns — Month & Year, Sales, Offline Ad Spend, Online Ad Spend, Stock-outs Count, Operating Costs,Median sales, Highest Sales, Lowest Sales.
• Social Feed — Add FB metrics like impressions,engagement, Google Analytics KPIs like referrals, top channels. You can get hold of the free Twitter streaming API and do a keyword analysis for conversations around your brand

Final Columns — Month & Year, Sales, Offline Ad Spend, Online Ad Spend, Stock-outs Count, Operating Costs,Median sales, Highest Sales, Engagement, Important Keywords, Top Channels, Referrals etc.

Some questions that can be answered now are;

• How is my performance compared to the industry?
• Are my ad spends worth it?
• Are my logistics hindering my growth?
• Is my sales correlated with the brand conversations and engagement?
• How does Twitter conversation affect traffic to my site, and does it impact sales?

Don’t get me wrong. Big Data is here to stay. It will be a focal point of many real world applications with immense impact. But it is important to develop a line of inquiry before you can reap the fruits of any big data environment. Enriching your data enables a cross functional analysis and unlock hidden insights.For most of the businesses out there, enriched data should be the first step. Big Data can wait for sometime.

Let’s chose to believe that insight mining from information, than information itself is critical for business success.

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