As a business owner and entrepreneur, you will have no doubt heard all about big data by now. It has been one of the biggest tech trends in business for the past couple of years. However, this fancy name shouldn't confuse you. Big data doesn’t mean that it is huge gigabytes of data. As a matter of fact, it is just another word for market research and the data collected through these methods. But market research has been around for years, right? So why is it a hot new trend all of a sudden?
It’s all down to the Internet. Thanks to many businesses now able to use online tools and software, they can now use their market research data to see a whole lot more, and they can analyze it to a greater degree. However, as with everything, there are cons as well as pros. Here we take a look at both the pros and cons of big data.
Pro: You Can Predict The Future… Kind Of
You should be able to tell what is likely to happen in the near future by looking at your data analytics. Sure, this prediction is exactly that - a prediction, which may prove to be wrong. But using big data in this way can help you get a good sense of what is likely to occur. The more comprehensive your data is, and the longer you have been collecting it for, the more accurate your predictions will be. But that still doesn’t mean their forecasts are set in stone.
Con: Big Data Can’t Read Your Mind
It would be great if big data could read your mind and understand what motivates you to make all your big decisions. If it knew this, it would be able to understand the relationship between motivation and action, and its stats and figures would be able to better predict what will happen in your business. However, it will never know for certain the correlation between your motivations and actions. And this is what keeps its predictions as mere forecasts.
Pro: It Can Help You Fix Something Before A Crisis Develops
As it can help us make predictions, big data can sometimes highlight a problem or issue that has the potential to develop into a crisis at a later stage. Once you have this information, you will be able to act in time to reduce the issue, and successfully avert a crisis. Not only that, though, but big data can help you build up a better idea of machines so that you can expertly tell when something is likely to go wrong with them.
Pro: Big Data Finds Surprising Relationships
Big data can show you correlations between various factors that you didn’t even realize were slightly linked. And these surprising relationships can then be examined in detail so that you can use them to your advantage in business.
Big data looks like it is here to stay. So it’s important you know all these pros and cons to efficiently use it to your advantage!