Big Data Strategy for Small Business

This unit teaches students how to define, source, and prioritize the data a small business needs and how to translate those data into a practical, budget-conscious big data strategy. Students learn to evaluate internal and external data sources (sensors, public portals, telematics, images), weigh costs/benefits and regulatory concerns, and prepare decision points that feed into later implementation and analytics units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze a small business’s key strategic questions and map them to prioritized data requirements, distinguishing between internal and external sources
• Evaluate at least three external and two internal data sources (e.g., US Census, EU Open Data Portal, smartphone sensors, telematics, image repositories) for relevance, quality, cost, and regulatory/privacy implications
• Apply cost–benefit and cloud-based Big Data-as-a-Service considerations to propose scalable ingestion, storage, and delivery pathways aligned with the four layers of big data
• Design a concise big data strategy document that identifies unanswered questions, required enablers, roles (types of data scientists), potential business models, and key decision points for implementation