From BIG DATA to SMART DATA

BIG DATA, a concept we all talk about but aren’t really sure how to make the most of in our daily activity.

When we talk about Big Data, we’re usually referring to the intelligent management of huge amounts of data—millions or billions of records from multiple sources—that, when handled intelligently, can help us make decisions to improve our processes, whether operational, commercial, or administrative.

But does this apply to us? Where do I get the data from? How do I manage it? What can I get out of processing all that information?

These are some of the questions we ask ourselves whenever we hear about Big Data, and that’s only natural. If we’re hoping for a magic wand that will tell us what we need to do to improve our business after feeding it all the data we can find from various sources—the Internet, MRP, WMS, TMS, Excel, Access, and any other internal or external source relevant to our activity—I’m afraid that magic wand hasn’t been invented yet.

While it’s true that today’s technology lets us handle all this information with agility, and we call that BIG DATA, it’s also true that these tools can never replace the knowledge we ourselves have about our own business. However, when managed intelligently, we can steer them toward our goals, and that’s what we call SMART DATA.

SMART DATA

Therefore, the concept of Smart Data is no longer as broad or ambiguous as that of Big Data. Instead, by organizing a well-structured project in which we’ve already defined what we want to achieve—based on our knowledge of the business—we can use Big Data or Business Intelligence tools to manage the databases we believe will be useful for the study. Naturally, these databases may be internal or external, come in multiple formats or from different sources, and contain either huge volumes of records or simply our own business data.

In short:

What really matters is knowing what information we need and where to find it. From there, it’s about designing a project using these tools that lets us combine and process the different sources of information to get a fast and, above all, reliable result.

Share on facebook
Share on google
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on pinterest
Share on print
Share on email