| "Trust, but verify" | | | | your target market and where it makes most sense |
| This is a quote from Horatio Caine (played by David | | | | to put those bets. In short you need -- drum roll please |
| Caruso) in the popular CBS series CSI Miami. It was | | | | -- business intelligence! |
| also the signature phrase of President Ronald Reagan | | | | From the boardroom to the home office |
| when discussing relations with the Soviet Union. As | | | | Yes, it is true that business intelligence (BI), also known |
| small business owners, many of you tend to rely on | | | | as analytics, used to be expensive and time |
| gut feelings to make some important decisions. A less | | | | consuming. It used to be a fancy phrase meant for |
| charitable way of looking at it is that you are making | | | | boardrooms of large corporations. However, it is as |
| those decisions based on emotional feelings such as | | | | important for smaller businesses as it is for larger. In |
| ego, insecurity, fear and greed. Some of those | | | | fact, considering that smaller businesses have much |
| decisions can make or break a SMB such as yours. It | | | | less financial resources at their disposal and do not |
| is prudent to challenge those decisions by collecting | | | | have any resilience to recover from bad decisions, BI |
| more facts and figures. | | | | becomes all the more critical for them. Nowadays, |
| Decisions, decisions | | | | PCs and servers have become a lot more powerful |
| Let us take an example. If you need to make decisions | | | | to do the heavy number crunching needed. And thanks |
| about where and how to spend your scarce | | | | to free open source BI software, these reports and |
| advertising dollars, you know it is a huge gamble. | | | | analysis can be done at a cost that is affordable to |
| However, especially if you are doing business online, | | | | small businesses. |
| you are already collecting mountains of data - the | | | | Intuition is valuable, enrich it with data |
| number of visitors to your site, the number that | | | | To sum it up, it doesn't mean that you small business |
| converted to leads and the number that actually | | | | owners should abandon the value provided by the gut |
| bought something and so on. In addition, you also have | | | | feelings and intuition that you bring to your |
| access to demographic and other data - income, age, | | | | decision-making every day. It simply means that you |
| geographical data - freely downloadable from the | | | | are going to have to start validating it with more facts |
| government web sites. You need to be able to | | | | and figures that only the right technology can make |
| analyze your data cross referencing it with the | | | | available. |
| demographic data to get actionable insight into who is | | | | |