OUTSOURCING ANALYTICS?

The surge of interest in big data has led to growing demand for analytics and out there emerged huge number of companies that provides a range of analytics outsourcing services, from basic data management to highly sophisticated analytics consulting addressing proactive risk management, operational efficiency across business functions, ongoing market intelligence, and help companies to make informed decisions that drive cost reduction and revenue maximization

Very large enterprises, for which big data analytics is core to their business strategy, already put in place the people, processes and sophisticated technologies to handle the ever growing data in-house. One of the factors that have helped Walmart to become one of the world’s largest and most successful retailers is the strength of its data management and analytics team in-house.

However, many mid level and smaller enterprises face bigger challenges in exploiting the data to create insight, or to drive in that insight into business processes to make informed decisions - at scale. Building analytics teams, is increasingly getting difficult – On one side, many companies lack the in-house knowledge and experience needed to put together actionable analytics teams in place and on another side, the talent market for analytics professionals has grown more and more tight. What’s more – the array of other hurdles that small and medium enterprise has to face in digitization, data connectivity, data privacy and security, integration issues and much more.

Analytics in Small and Medium Enterprises

Most SMEs now understand that data-driven business processes are not a nice-to-have but a need-to-have capability today. They also accept that big data has great potential to transform their businesses and outperform the competition.

Competitive pressures, coupled with customer’s expectations, have created the right momentum for companies to reorient their core strategies toward a broader and big data based channels. Many small and medium enterprises that invested in advanced big data technologies are already starting to reap significant benefits out of it.

Challenges in big data transformation for SMEs

While the business opportunities of big data are obvious, there are number of challenges that enterprises have to overcome - and pitfalls to avoid - on their transformation journey. The following are some key issues that enterprises are struggling to address in the process of planning and moving towards big data oriented business models.

1. Difficulty in identifying the right data and determining how to best use it.

2. Developing big data related use cases and looking for revenue models outside their traditional way of doing business.

3. Data access and connectivity - Though we call it as a digitization era, connected era, so and so., a majority of data points are not yet connected today in 2016, and most SMEs do not have effective IT architecture to aggregate and manage their data across the enterprise.

4. Another critical challenge is deciding how far and how fast to traverse the big data journey. To leverage data means to work with innovative technology partners who can help creating the right infrastructure that can adapt to changes in the landscape in an efficient manner.

5. Addressing multi-channel synchronization, integration issues, privacy and security threats and associated effective authentication and monitoring mechanism, IT architecture and associated costs, balancing risks vs. benefits, implementation strategies and understanding the cost-benefit analysis, value to the business, and potential return on investment.

6. Wide talent gap, the surge in data scientist’s salary and the lack of in-house knowledge and experience needed to put together highly skilled analysts, database engineers, report designers, statisticians and econometricians ready to support their complex big data analytics projects makes it a nightmare for small and medium enterprises to think about setting up their own analytics team.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Saranya Anandh is the MD of www.gladwinanalytics.com; an international professional media specialized for big data, analytics, internet of things and cloud computing professionals.

Besides writing on Gladwin Analytics, she also write guest blogs for some of the world's leading Big Data Analytics employers on topics including big data, analytics, data privacy, data security and much more topics related to data, analytics, IoT and Cloud Computing.

Gladwin Analytics helps global Big Data Analytics businesses to generate potential B2B leads through their Marketing Solutions (Advertisements, Newsletter Promotions, and Guest Blogging). Click here to contact me for any business inquiries.