by Angela Guess
Pratik Dholakiya writes in SmallBizTrends, “Big data and business intelligence (BI) used to be only for enterprise companies. Now, however, thanks to the software as a service (SaaS) revolution, even small businesses can afford to track and tap into a wealth of information. However, becoming a data-driven small business isn’t easy. Because you’re dealing with complex troves of records that have multiple sources and are therefore highly unlikely to be structured uniformly, it can be difficult to process it all and interpret it into insights your business can actually use. What’s more, many of the leading business intelligence solutions require unreasonably expensive and lengthy onboarding processes and they can only be used by teams of coders. Not exactly small business-friendly. Here’s how to make the most of the data at your fingertips.”
Dholakiya’s tips begin, “(1) Use a Central Location for Data. A central location for all of your data means you save time getting it all together. There’s no need to log in and out of multiple accounts to collect the data and join it all in a single place, as long as your holistic BI dashboard can feed all the data from multiple sources to a single cloud-based hub… (2) Ensure Wide Accessibility. To be the most efficient, your BI platform needs to be accessible from multiple devices. This is where using a cloud-based platform comes in beneficial. Because it runs in the cloud, anyone with access can log in to the platform from anywhere there is an Internet connection, using the web or an app on a mobile device. Being able to get to the information you need, when and where you need it, ensures that you’ll be able to make the most of it.”
Photo credit: Flickr/ markus spiske