Your Future Depends on Your Ability to Understand Big Data. Here’s What You Need to Know.

This is what today’s entrepreneurs need to understand. 90% of the world’s data is estimated to have been created in the past 2 years and most recently via mobile devices. Whether you know it or not, this data is impacting your business. More importantly, your ability to understand the available insights from this data and navigate through this real-time information will determine your future success.

Simplifying Big Data: What Entrepreneurs Can Learn from Law Enforcement

You might be surprised to learn, for example, that your local law enforcement is using big data to solve crime. What used to take weeks for highly skilled data scientists to sift through can now be crunched in minutes by non-technical law enforcement using software tools that dramatically simplify the ability to manipulate vast amounts of unstructured data.

I had an opportunity to speak with a former FBI agent, Louis Grever, who is now a board member of Wynyard, an advanced crime analytics company. Mr. Grever, along with his colleague Derek Brown, VP of Americas for Wynyard, walked me through specific use cases where local law enforcement (not data scientists) leveraged big data for pattern matching, real-time visualization, and the ability to deploy limited resources in a smarter and more efficient manner.

Sound familiar? Like local law enforcement, your business has limited resources and lacks the budget to employ the highly skilled data scientists you’d love to have on your team. However, your business is currently being disrupted by the impact of big data. Your customers expect you to listen to them via social media channels. They have given you permission to market to them, but expect you to use the data you’ve collected from them in intelligent ways.

So here’s what you need to do.

1. Stop Expecting Others to Figure Out Your Big Data Solutions. If you wait until you have highly proficient engineers on your team to solve your big data challenges, chances are you will be eclipsed by your competitors. You don’t have to be a data scientist to leverage the power and impact of big data. Take that same entrepreneurial spirt that got you to step out of your comfort zone and start leveraging the vast amounts of data that will help you grow your business.
2. Identify Your Biggest Information Needs. What insights could help shape your ability to better serve the needs of your best customers? This could be as simple as listening to what your customers are saying via social media channels or observing where they are getting lost on your website. Or perhaps it’s about better understanding the customer journey. How are your customers discovering you in the first place? Where do they want to engage with your brand? What’s their preferred way to transact and buy your products and services? And how do you help them become advocates of your offering?
3. Determine What Data Provides The Best Insights You Need. Once you’ve identified your biggest information needs, determine what data best illuminates the information you seek. Google Analytics, for example, provides a treasure trove of data regarding how your customers engage with your website. While Facebook and Twitter provide all sorts of data about how your customers engage with your brand on your social channels. For every marketing problem you’re looking to solve, there is a plethora of available data just waiting to be tapped. There are also many third party suppliers ready and willing to help you access additional data you might need to solve your particular marketing challenge.
4. Find the Software Tools You Need to Turn Data into Insights. This is where most entrepreneurs fall short. The expectation here is that you need to be a data scientist to extract the insights you need form the data. Yet, in most cases, there are several free and inexpensive software solutions out there that allow you analyze the data. For example:
   1. Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/ — The industry standard free platform for web and app analytics.
   2. IBM’s Watson Analytics: http://www.ibm.com/analytics/watson-analytics — A freemium platform for analyzing and visualizing your data automatically, built on the same technology that IBM used to beat humans on Jeopardy.
   3. Canopy Labs: https://canopylabs.com/ — Sales analytics and optimization platform.
   4. Swipely: https://www.swipely.com/ — An analytics tool for brick and mortar businesses, like restaurants and retail.
   5. Gephi: http://gephi.github.io/ — Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. Runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Gephi is open-source and free.
   6. R: https://www.r-project.org/ — And if you’re feeling adventurous or have more engineering skills than you’d like to admit, R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It compiles and runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS, if you are looking to unleash your inner data scientist.

And I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s out there. For every big data problem, there are free and relatively inexpensive solutions available to you. There are also companies like Wynyard who have started in one industry and are branching out into several others. So you can go it alone or you can find a partner to work with you, but whatever you do, get in the game. The longer you ignore the impact of big data on your business, the further you are falling behind. Instead, jump in and enjoy the discovery process as you listen to what your customers really want and find new ways to deliver it to them.