Engineering Big Data to Small Businesses: Lessons Learned from a Case Study

Big Data has become an important technical force to advance many industries. Many big data techniques have been invented and open-sourced for public use. The small businesses, which form the major part of the whole business world, still face great challenges in applying big data solutions to their own businesses. However, there are few cases that have been published to report the procedure of engineering big data in small businesses. This fact leads to insufficient references for small businesses to take to figure out their own scenarios of applying big data. In this paper, we report a pilot case study on a small business applying big data to an electric signal process project. It describes in detail the procedure of analyzing the business logics, identifying big data requirements, and selecting appropriate big data techniques for engineering solutions. We also share lessons learned from this case study, which can be a general reference for those small businesses on trying their own big data application cases.