Gartner has predicted 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’s Distinguished Research Vice President Jim Hare said disruptions such as the covid pandemic are causing historical data that reflects past conditions to quickly become obsolete, which is breaking many production AI and machine learning (ML) models. In addition, he says decision making by humans and AI has become more complex and demanding, and overly reliant on data hungry deep learning approaches. 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. Hare said D&A leaders need to turn to new analytics techniques knows as ‘small data’ and ‘wide data’ and 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. He added that both the 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]. 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.
