Enabling Data Analytics in Small to Medium Businesses
As Clive Humby said, “Data is the new oil” and is becoming ever more important to every industry, profession, and business with incredible applications like artificial intelligence and machine learning. Looking specifically at the Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) market segment, there is a significant gap in the use of data analytics. Only 15% of SMBs have a “data-driven” culture. Companies that leverage data to drive decision-making have seen increased revenue, profit, and employee output. Despite the benefits, SMB owners run into three main issues. First, a lack of bandwidth as time and human capital are stretched thin. Second, technical expertise as many analytics tools require coding expertise or knowledge of systems and tools which many SMBs do not possess. Lastly, many SMBs lack the finances to invest in costly tools or subject matter experts. Enterprise-level organizations will continue to invest in analytics leaving SMBs behind and increasing economic inequality. Our solution is DataMate, a Data as a Service (DaaS) no-code, low-cost, and low-time intensive platform designed to provide end-to-end analytics solutions for SMB owners. The platform allows users to automatically pull data from sources (ex. point of sale, customer relationship management, etc.), store data in a centralized location, and lastly, visualize data through dashboards to enable SMBs with data-driven decision-making capabilities. Once at scale, we will be able to create models and deliver advanced predictive and prescriptive analytics.
- Author (aut): Sidhwa, Zain
- Co-author: Ramakumar, Kiran
- Thesis director: Byrne, Jared
- Committee member: McCreless, Tam
- Committee member: Ferrara, Justin
- Contributor (ctb): Barrett, The Honors College
- Contributor (ctb): Department of Supply Chain Management
- Contributor (ctb): Department of Information Systems