With Big Data, Think Micro Insights at Scale

Getting big value out of big data is often a matter of making micro insights accessible and actionable for employees throughout the enterprise.

Numerous companies are investing massive sums in big data, but many still fail to achieve the full potential of these investments. Why? Often, they set their sights on achieving “Big Insights” from their data—game-changing breakthroughs that solve a major problem or unlock a significant opportunity. They may aggregate and analyze data to gain a 360-degree view of the customer, for example, hoping to spark a stupendous marketing idea or blockbuster new product.

While there’s no denying that such discoveries can be worth pursuing, the process can be overwhelming in effort and underwhelming in value considering the time and investment necessary. Sometimes, it can pay bigger dividends to think “small.” For many companies, reaping big data’s greatest rewards is a matter of focusing on micro insights, making them widely accessible, and enabling actionable results.

Insights that are “small” but contextually relevant can help people throughout the organization perform their everyday tasks smarter and better. After all, the real value of the widely sought 360-degree view of the customer is that it can enable different parts of the organization to gain insights that help customer service professionals enhance interactions, allow marketing people to optimize campaigns, and enable sales teams to generate new leads, to name just a few examples.

The Washington Post, for instance, uses data on readers’ clicks and engagement not just to optimize its content and ad recommendations, but also to improve newsroom workflows, give journalists insight into how readers engage with their content, and inform executives’ strategic decisions. At UPS, meanwhile, the ORION analytics project delivers optimized delivery routes to every one of its drivers in the United States each day, saving the company significantly each year on fuel costs.

When adopted for different types of decisions by employees across the enterprise, micro insights can help companies turn big data into big value. Of course, in order for those insights to be valuable to the organization, employees have to be able to find them.

Large companies waste millions of dollars every year when employees search fruitlessly for information. Instead of making them log into different systems and perform multiple searches to surface insights, a better strategy is to embed micro insights directly into the software tools and applications they already use.