How a small and medium enterprise can start their journey towards transforming into a data-driven organization. They can begin with baby steps by adapting technologies, processes, and awareness centered on data and data-driven decision-making.

 If you are all a small business, it’s your time to invest smartly and pay attention to your data assets; your large competitors are already doing it.

Unlike before, big-budget enterprises aren’t the only ones who can leverage data and advanced technologies. In this super-connected world, the data which you ignore unintentionally has the potential voice of your customers, these are important not only for large organizations, rather it is equally or more important for emerging small and medium organizations in winning their battle.

Small and medium organizations can start their small steps, there is no need for a big budget to build the technical landscape and adopt the data practices. Thanks to the new entrances and also the simplified models introduced by industry-leading products like Microsoft Power BI, Qlik, Tableau, etc.

For an instance, Microsoft Power BI is really a turnkey solution for organizations of any size to embark on their data journey. Power BI easily enables organizations to easily scale up or scale down based on their growth, its cloud publishing feature provides easy access to their dashboards and reports from anywhere using their mobile devices. This was not something a small business could have afforded a few years ago. Power BI and other low-code business intelligence platforms are now simplified to an extent by the technical team that has very minimal involvement in building and publishing dashboards and analytics for their organizations.

The journey begins by understanding the organization’s current and future objectives very clearly, it eventually dictates the kinds of data to be tracked and analyzed. We help organizations in identified such data points by studying their organizations’ strategy and roadmap. Once the data points are clear, which is then converted to Key Performance Indicators and visualizations in a manner that the senior executives can interpret their business and its directions in a nutshell. Our data science and Power BI consulting team have vast experience in dealing with different industries. This really makes us help our customers to bring in industry best practices and adopt them in the projects.

SMEs can start their data analytics journey in baby steps, considering the limitations such as budget, expertise, other operational and overhead

1. Adopt rather than reinventing – Start with a data analytics model which is already being used in a similar industry, and let the consultants help you with a starter pack till the organization realizes and forms their own model 

2. Technology – Identify and adopt a technology that is easy to enter and exit without a heavy CAPEX. Microsoft Power BI is an excellent example of such a tool. Its starter pack can barely cost you anything in terms of the license, absolutely no investment for hardware infrastructure, its cloud publishing allows you to access dashboards and analytics from were using your iPad, Mobile, Laptop, etc. 

3. Redefine – As you become familiarized with the kick-start model, start defining the critical data points, and KPIs on which you want to focus. Make sure the necessary arrangements are done to capture relevant data to measure the specific KPIs. Give importance to not only financial indicators but also non-financial measures which help you succeed in long-term goals 

4. Operating model – Data analytics practice is very dynamic, the KPIs and measures which are important now may not be relevant after a few months. Need to have a cost-effective operating model to support the ongoing enhancements required on your data analytics and visualization models. Organizations can cross-train internal resources to handle such enhancements or engage a partner who can help them to handle such requirements on an ongoing support model.