Business that don’t learn how to ride the energy of these waves risk getting left behind. And Big Data is no longer just for the “big guys.” Medium and small-sized companies are also learning how to put the power of their business data to use breaking down competitive barriers to entry and targeting customer segments that used to be too difficult to reach.

Don’t Wipe Out

The business appetite for all things data is growing as the costs of data infrastructure are plummeting, the ability to ingest mass volumes of data is increasing, and analytic tools and processes are simplifying, bringing the previously rarefied world of big data analytics to all corners of the company.

But if the power of big data is not tamed, companies risk getting swamped by the sheer volume of information bearing down on the manager’s desktop. Unchanneled, this flow of data can lead to IT departments and analyst teams spending all their time shoveling data and marketing teams analyzing data instead of marketing.

How to ride the Big Data Wave

In order to harness the power of big data work for your business to create strong and sustainable competitive advantage we recommend pursuing the following actions

• Monetize your data. Connect your business or market development plans to decision management and actions that can be quantified through deep analysis of business data at the level of customer impact. Build competency in decision analysis, data science and guided analytics across your entire organization so that data driven decisions can inform decisions made by front-line managers every day, rather limited to annual strategic planning processes.
  
  
• Tame your data. Learn how to structure your data to support the analytics you need to do. Data directly pulled from operational data stores or enterprise data warehouses rarely contains the metrics and calculations needed to support actionable analytics. Effort and energy must be placed into developing relevant datasets and selecting the vital few KPIs that measure the success story for the specific project at hand.
  
  
• Let the data flow. Connect your decision management, analytics and monetization strategy processes into an interconnected, seamless flow. Disjointed processes and departmental flows introduce gaps that sap the power of the process.
  
  
• Embrace data democracy. By deploying the new breed of self-service analysis and reporting tools, you can crowd source business insights within your company, eliminating old bottlenecks of report development by the BI team or the constrained capacity of the analytics group.
  
  
• Create trust in the data. Develop analytic and report certification processes. As reports and analytics proliferate with self-service analytics, create a standard of health and validity to let users know the results can be trusted. By putting reports from individual departments through a certification process similar to UL labeling on electrical products, broader consumers will know the level of scrutiny that has been put on the report by Data Governance and IT teams and thereby trust the data and metrics contained within it.
  
  
• Get the right equipment and tools. Invest in a data and analytic infrastructure that lets you keep more data cheaper, process it faster, and access it easier. Don’t try to re-purpose old data technology to meet the demands of big data analytics. The performance will not be able to keep up leading to disappointment and disillusionment, while competitors who get the right equipment for the job pass you by.
  
  

Businesses, large and small, can no longer afford to be complacent. One-to-one marketing enabled by big data helps large companies target smaller and smaller customer segments that would have escaped their notice previously. Small and Medium companies are tapping into the power of information to extend their reach as the big data wave levels the playing field. Companies that learn how channel the energy of big data are in for an exhilarating ride, while those that don’t will get left behind.

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Kathy Williams Chiang is VP, Business Insights, at Wunderman Data Management. Andrew Roman Wells is the CEO of Aspirent, a management-consulting firm focused on analytics. They are the co-authors of Monetizing Your Data: A Guide to Turning Data into Profit-Driving Strategies and Solutions. For more information, please visit www.monetizingyourdata.com.