Big data: What Seemed Like Big Data a Couple of Years Back is Now Small Data!

Gartner, Inc. predicts that organizations’ attention will shift from big data to small and wide data by 2025 as 70% are likely to find the latter more useful for context-based analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

Small data consumes less data but is just as insightful because it leverages techniques such as;

• Time-series analysis techniques
• Few-shot learning
• Synthetic data
• Self-supervised learning

Wide refers to the use of unstructured and structured data sources to draw insights. Together, small and wide data can be used across industries for predicting consumer behavior, improving customer service, and extracting behavioral and emotional intelligence in real-time. This facilitates hyper-personalization and provides customers with an improved customer experience. It can also be used to improve security, detect fraud, and develop adaptive autonomous systems such as robots that use machine learning algorithms to continuously improve performance.

Why is big data not relevant anymore?

First being the large volumes of data being produced everyday from nearly 4.9 billion people browsing the internet for an average of seven hours a day. Further, embedded sensors are also continuously generating stream data throughout the day, making big data even bigger.

Secondly, big data processing tools are unable to keep pace and pull data on demand. Big data can be complex and difficult to manage due to the various intricacies involved, right from ingesting the raw data to making it ready for analytics. Despite storing millions or even billions of records, it may still not be big data unless it is usable and of good quality. Moreover, for data to be truly meaningful in providing a holistic view, it will have to be aggregated from different sources, and be in structured and unstructured formats. Proper organization of data is essential to keep it stable and access it when needed. This can be difficult in the case of big data.

Thirdly, there is a dearth of skilled big data technology experts. Analyzing big data requires data scientists to clean and organize the data stored in data lakes and warehouses before integrating and running analytics pipelines. The quality of insights is determined by the size of the IT infrastructure, which, in turn, is restricted by the investment capabilities of the enterprises.

What is small data?

Small data can be understood as structured or unstructured data collected over a period of time in key functional areas. Small data is less than a terabyte in size. It includes;

• Sales information
• Operational performance data
• Purchasing data

It is decentralized and can fit data packets securely and with interoperable wrappers. It can facilitate the development of effective AI models, provide meaningful insights, and help capture trends. Prior to adding larger and more semi-or unstructured data, the integrity, accessibility, and usefulness of the core data should be ascertained.

Benefits of Small Data

Having a separate small data initiative can prove beneficial for the enterprise in many ways. It can address core strategic problems about the business and improve the application of big data and advanced analytics. Business leaders can gain insights even in the absence of substantial big data. Managing small data efficiently can improve overall data management.

Some of the advantages of small data are:

• It is present everywhere: Anybody with a smartphone or a computer can generate small data every time they use social media or an app. Social media is a mine of information on buyer preferences and decisions.
• Gain quick insights:  Small data is easy to understand and can provide quick actionable insights for making strategic decisions to remain competitive and innovative.
• It is end-user focused: When choosing the cheapest ticket or the best deals, customers are actually using small data. So, small data can help businesses understand what their customers are looking for and customize their solutions accordingly.
• Enable self-service: Small data can be used by business users and other stakeholders without needing expert interpretation. This can accelerate the speed of decision making for timely response to events in real-time.

For small data to be useful, it has to be verifiable and have integrity. It must be self-describing and interoperable.

Indium can help small data work for you

Indium Software, a cutting-edge software development firm, has a team of dedicated data scientists who can help with data management, both small and big. Recognized by ISG as a strong contender for data science, data engineering, and data lifecycle management services, the company works closely with customers to identify their business needs and organize data for optimum results.

Indium can design the data architecture to meet customers’ small and large data needs. They also work with a variety of tools and technologies based on the cost and needs of customers. Their vast experience and deep expertise in open source and commercial tools enable them to help customers meet their unique data engineering and analytics goals.

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