The Role of Data in Small Businesses

When it comes to small businesses, data is one of the most powerful tools for growth. Collecting and analyzing data can help you make informed decisions about your business, which in turn can help you grow and expand.

If you're thinking about starting or growing your small business, there's no better time than now! With the internet at your fingertips, you have access to all sorts of information on how to start a business and what it takes to succeed. But what many people don't realize is that collecting and analyzing data is one of the most important parts of growing a small business.

The first step in collecting data is figuring out what kind of information will be most useful for you. For example: 

- Are there any trends in your industry that might indicate where your company will go next? 

- What kind of customer base do you have? 

- What does their demographic look like? 

Once you've figured out what kind of information will be most valuable for your company, think about how often you should collect it. Remember that this isn't something that should be done once or twice—it should be ongoing so that it can provide real insight into where your company is headed next.

Data analytics is becoming an increasingly important component of the small business owner's toolkit. It's critical to your success as a business owner and you should be using it to grow your business.

However, data analytics can be intimidating at first. You may not know where to start or how to get started, so here are some tips on how to get started with data analytics:

1. Start by understanding what data analytics is and isn't. Data analytics is a valuable tool that can help you make better decisions and improve business processes. It's also used by large corporations and even governments in order to collect information about their customers and analyze trends in order to make better decisions about products or services being sold or delivered within those organizations' walls (or outside those walls).

2. Make sure that this data is actually useful for your organization before investing in it! For example, if you're using data analytics for customer retention purposes (like keeping track of how many people sign up for your email newsletter), then make sure that there's a strong correlation between what's happening with those emails and whether or not they've actually opened them up—or if they're opening them at all…

3. Small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy. Whether you're running a small business, or you're just starting out, it's important to understand how data analytics can help you keep growing and thriving.

AI vs Managers

Managers and business owners at all levels will have to learn how to quickly adapt to AI solutions in order to automate administrative task that consumes a lot of their time.

A Study conducted by HRB identified 5 practices that managers need to master

Practice 1. Leave Administration to AI: The study shows that more than a half of managers spend over 50% of their time on administrative work such as Task allocation, schedules, employee shifts, Reports. Tableau has implemented a system that converts analyzed dashboards to written reports.

Practice 2. Focusing on Judgment work: Emotional intelligence that include organizational history ,expertise and experience is key to execute on judgement work such as business ethics, and creative business decision making.

Practice 3. Think of AI as a new colleague : lets us start thinking about AI and technology as support rather than replacing human skills, because many of human skills cannot be replaced by AI example empathy, discretion and human judgement are skills that modern managers have to sharpen while letting AI deal with more administrative work.

Practice 4. Embed design thinking to your teams: by fostering creativity and collaborative work to cross functional teams. The CEO of Insurance Australia Group, Peter hammer emphasized on creative and collaboration that ‘we need people can layer ideas on ideas a combination leading to a bigger picture’

Practice 5: Developing social and networking skills: Managers must able to mine ideas, insights and diverse perspectives by means of coaching, collaborating in different industries and increasing the social networking skills.

AI can prove to be intelligent than human beings in the near future because it will be bring quick supportive and prescriptive analytics from massive data in the shortest time possible but can never take away judgement, collaboration and creative work from humans, therefore this means rather than competing with AI managers must look at AI as support in decision making.