These are big words…
- DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
- DATA ANALYTICS
- REGRESSION, CLUSTERING, NEURAL NETWORKS
- CLOUD HOSTING TECHNOLOGY
From some big vendors…
- IBM WATSON
- ORACLE CLOUD
- MICROSOFT AZURE
- SAS, SPSS
From an outsider’s perspective, who is not familiar with the industry, yes, it sounds untouchable and expensive. Technologies and consultants normally reserved for the corporate big wigs.
FALSE. Trust me.
Remember what a main frame computer looked like? It usually took up a whole floor in a massive structure that housed cooling and safety peripherals to make the FBI blush. Not so anymore.
The acquisition of data is now as easy as putting on your slippers. Our connected devices (especially cellphones) are producing data even while we sleep. For more on that read our Blog post:
The Digitized You [#]. Part One
With data visualization companies sprouting up like weeds, it’s now easy and free to take the data and interpret it based on the questions you want answered. Even the best of the best are offering free platforms; IBM, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, etc. The big question here is:
Have you audited the integrity of the data feeding your dashboard ? (GIGO)
Yeah, but what about all the expensive server hardware and storage?
No worries, AWS (Amazon Web Services), and other data storage partners like Oracle are offering pay as you go storage and usage services. They offer reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Usually free to join, pay only for what you use. How sweet is that !
Data Acquisition + Usage & Storage + Visualization & Interpretation =
Powerful Analytics available to all Business Segments
Trust ME. Why?
Besides the hard coded operational business experience I have from being in brick and mortar businesses for over fifteen years, I am now transitioning into data science, analytics and digital business model transformation. Why? Because I want to use my operational business experience and data analytics skills to assist Corporate, Mid-Market, and Small business owners to become more efficient and as profitable as posible.
How do I know it’s not expensive?
I most recently took a six month course from a local IT institution on Business Intelligence Marketing and Reporting. Awesome. We explored deep analytics scenarios with the MS stack in SSIS (ETL), SSAS (Analysis), SSRS (Reporting). When I was done, I never thought I’d be able to launch my own boutique consultancy, since the hardware and software was going to be too expensive. FALSE.
In the very laptop that I am using to write this blog, I have an extremely powerful data analysis engine (that I was able to purchase with minimal investment) that is capable of data science at it’s best. It can crunch millions of rows of data for outputs like regression analysis, outlier detection, segmentation & clustering, neural networks and relationship analysis, amongst many others.
It can also import (with creative inputs from yours truly) and mash up data sets from any available data source, including externally hosted databases, free data sites, social media platforms, Hadoop, SQL, (and whatever other fancy expensive sounding terms you may have heard). All from the comfort of my $800 laptop.
We can study, interpret, and cook (mash up with other data sources) your company data to develop algorithmic solutions to align your business strategy and drive enhanced creative marketing models.
Believe it or not.
So, what are you waiting for to integrate digital and data analytics into your business model ?
Data Analytics is NOT expensive anymore.
Thanks for reading. Please like and share. Comments, ideas are welcome.