According to the Gartner Hype Cycle of 2020, the Small Data trend will become increasingly important in the next five to ten years. This is in direct contrast to the Big Data movement, which can be seen as the driving force behind digitization.
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Small Data in the Gartner Hype Cycle 2020 (Source: Gartner)
Small Data is data that occurs at a scale and format that makes it accessible, informative, and actionable.
In doing so, they provide compact and consumable information that answers a specific question, for example in a business context, and makes it accessible to humans. While Big Data is used for analysis using artificial intelligence, Small Data helps in understanding processes, such as search histories, predictions, or alerts.
What is small data (Source: Riccardo Osti)
With Small Data, even in contrast to Big Data, you often have a combination of structured and unstructured data that allows for human analysis and exploitation.
Small Data in the business domain is therefore always applied when it comes to looking behind the scenes, be it customer insights or analyses of user behavior.
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Alexander Pinker is an innovation profiler, future strategist and media expert who helps companies understand the opportunities behind technologies such as artificial intelligence for the next five to ten years. He is the founder of the consulting firm "Alexander Pinker - Innovation Profiling", the innovation marketing agency "innovate! communication" and the news platform "Medialist Innovation". He is also the author of three books and a lecturer at the Technical University of Würzburg-Schweinfurt.
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