Big Data for Small Business for Dummies

Capitalise on big data to add value to your company. Big Data For Small Business For Dummies explains what big data actually is and how it can help you make better business decisions and transform your business model by developing products and services. Topics to be covered include: * Using big data to make better decisions in small businesses - SMART methodology * Using big data to transform your business model - developing new offerings, products and services around data * How small companies can get their hands on big data - public data, social media, free data, ways of collecting and accessing data (generate, provoke, etc.) * Understanding the technological change that underpins big data - cloud, hadoop, MapR, etc. * Analytics: How to turn our data into insights - types of big data analytics (text analyse, video analysis, image analysis, etc.) * Developing big data competencies in small businesses - skills shortage, expensive - service providers, partnering, crowed sourcing, etc. * Creating a big data infrastructure in small businesses - rending resources, no in-house footprint, cloud, SAAS - solution overview (Google, Amazon, SAP, etc.) * Developing a big data strategy for a small business[AK1] The aim of Big Data For Small Business For Dummies is to show small businesses how they can develop business models and products around big data. This title is a good fit with our SME and entrepreneurship titles and wouldn't focus on the technical aspects of big data. Business data has existed for a long time. However, it has been trapped in filing cabinets, and floppy disks, and so has been an untapped resource. Older software helped only so much. Many such applications could work only with individual databases and were often costly and difficult to use. Until very recently, such data could be used only by much larger organizations. Now, thanks to a reduction in technology costs and new tools that display complex databases in a much simpler manner, smaller companies can benefit much more from data. Your company's databases can be cross-referenced with the expanding amount of information drawn not just from social networks, government databases, and usage patterns on mobile devices, but also from increasingly specialized information sources such as digitized transcripts of call-center interactions and sensors sending updates from various steps within a supply chain, and do so affordably. Companies ranging from established giants to startups offer affordable, cloud-based data-crunching services-which can help you get nondigitized data into data-crunchable form-and today virtually anyone can get involved in the world of Big Data. Big Data for Small Business For Dummies will explain exactly how you can understand Big Data, and use it to your advantage in order better develop new products and services and transform your small business. von Marr, Bernard