Gartner Says 70% of Organizations Will Shift Their Focus From Big to Small and Wide Data By 2025
Gartner, Inc. predicts that by 2025, 70% of organizations will shift their focus from big to small and wide data, providing more context for analytics and making artificial intelligence (AI) less data hungry.
Gartner analysts discussed new data and analytics (D&A) techniques to build a resilient, adaptable and data literate organization during the Gartner Data & Analytics Summit 2021, which is taking place virtually in EMEA through Thursday.
D&A leaders need to turn to new analytics techniques knows as “small data” and “wide data”. “Taken together they are capable of using available data more effectively, either by reducing the required volume or by extracting more value from unstructured, diverse data sources,” said Mr. Hare.
Small and Wide Data Allow More Robust Analytics and AI
Small data is an approach that requires less data but still offers useful insights. The approach includes certain time-series analysis techniques or few-shot learning, synthetic data, or self-supervised learning.
Wide data enables the analysis and synergy of a variety of small and large, unstructured, and structured data sources. It applies X analytics, with X standing for finding links between data sources, as well as for a diversity of data formats. These formats include tabular, text, image, video, audio, voice, temperature, or even smell and vibration.
“Both approaches facilitate more robust analytics and AI, reducing an organization’s dependency on big data and enabling a richer, more complete situational awareness or 360-degree view,” said Mr. Hare. “D&A leaders apply both techniques to address challenges such as low availability of training data or developing more robust models by using a wider variety of data.”
Small and Wide Data Applications
Potential areas where small and wide data can be used are demand forecasting in retail, real-time behavioural and emotional intelligence in customer service applied to hyper-personalization, and customer experience improvement.
Other areas include physical security or fraud detection and adaptive autonomous systems, such as robots, which constantly learn by the analysis of correlations in time and space of events in different sensory channels.
Gartner clients can read more in “Top Trends in Data and Analytics for 2021: From Big to Small and Wide Data.”
Learn how to use data & analytics to re-engineer decision making in the free Gartner e-book “The Future of Decisions.”
