Like me, have you always thought, to have any meaningful business intelligence dashboard your company should be moderately big (in terms of data generation)? Here is an article which argues for BI dashboards for small business, pretty effectively. “Why Small Businesses Need A Business Intelligence Dashboard” (link -  http://cloudtweaks.com/2015/06/small-business-intelligence-dashboard/)

The article goes on to say BI dashboards for small business offers 5 advantages,

Greater transparency - Using a BI Dashboard would provide the owner the power of real-time information of what is working and what is not, a campaign, an offer or a banner ad. He can take corrective action instantly, cutting his losses or investing more on what’s working.

Saves time - Actionable intelligence one gets out of a BI Dashboard that too instantly is what makes it valuable, the same would have needed a person to plow for half a day. Also, the information can be  viewed dynamically.

Better results - It keeps you focused, you concentrate on the KPIs without the distraction of volumes of information that gets created by all departments.

Decreased stress - You as a business owner won’t be chasing the reports anymore, on the other hand, BI dashboards can update daily with key KPIs. With all important info at your fingertips, you are stress-free.

Increased productivity - This can be both ways, to increase your employee productivity as well as your’s, your productivity would go up as you are no longer looking for information to work with, that’s already available. Let’s say, one of the KPIs you are measuring is the response time in calling the leads, if you can show, earlier the prospect is called greater the chance of conversion, the productivity of your calling team would have increased drastically.

I leave it here, read the complete article for more details.

Information graphics or infographics represents Data/Information in a visual form that helps in processing that infomation quickly and clearly however complex the data may be.

Two such Big Data infographics that caught my eye while I was going through this article – “Top Big Data Infographics From The Past Year” (http://businessintelligence.com/bi-insights/top-big-data-infographics-from-the-past-year/) are here below.

The first one, “The who, why and how of Big Data”,(http://www.bain.com/infographics/big-data/), has a representation that comes as no surprise as to who would be the largest spender for Big Data services, you guesses are right, Financial services companies followed by Software/Internet and Government, in the current year these verticals will be spending $6.4 bn and 2.8 bn respectively.

Then the third visual on the same infographic speaks about the model in which companies would “make Big Data part of their operations…”, what really interested me was the line “But none of them are led by IT”. That comes as no surprise to a few but is still surprising for many as even a year ago most (almost 40% according to one survey) of the Big Data effort were led by IT departments.

The second infographic, “How much data does the world create every year?” (https://web-assets.domo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ThePhysicalSizeofBigData.jpg) would make your mind go numb. They quote a report from Stanford Univ. which says, the whole of humanity produces around 1200 Exabytes of data every year.

Got lost, just like me, the infographic puts it in perspective in more than couple of ways, here is one.

1200 Exabytes, when broken into GBs and stored on a common device, say 16 GB iPhone 5s, would take 80.53 billion phones, that is like, placing these phones next to each other would cover 100 circles around the earth.

Simply amazing, isn’t it?