KUALA LUMPUR:
SMALL and medium enterprises (SMEs) are starting to adopt data analytics to innovate their businesses and stay relevant in the market.
Asean Data Analytics Exchange (Adax) chief executive officer Sharala Axyrd said there had been encouraging response from the SME segment, with 20 per cent of its 2,378 data professionals being SME business owners.
Adax, a public-private partnership between Malaysia Digital Economy Corp (MDEC) and the Centre of Applied Data Science, enables businesses, governments and professionals to adopt data analytics and empower decision making and innovation.
“It is encouraging to see the progress, especially with SMEs starting to look at analytics as a way to innovate their businesses.
“We see encouraging response and inquiries everyday from SMEs, asking to participate in our training and workshops,” she said in an interview recently.
Adax was set up early this year to produce data professionals and data scientists.
As one of the five key enablers of the big data analytics ecosystem, MDEC’s target is to nurture 20,000 data professionals, including 2,000 data scientists, by 2020.
Sharala said in order to stay relevant in the market, SMEs had to adopt analytics as it was a necessity.
“We are not asking them to do big data analytics, just any sort of analytics would do. They can start from simple things like analysing inventory for small shops via Microsoft Excel.
“For those interested, they can call Adax to join our two-hour workshop. Besides, we also conduct training on business strategy for business owners.
“We educate businesses, governments, academia and start-ups, enabling them to rapidly adopt data analytics as an integral part of their operations,” she said.
Although it was not easy to attract people to attend the first workshop organised by Adax, Sharala said the responses had improved.
Adax’s main goal is to develop the ecosystem, build a critical mass of talent pool in the big data analytics, and to foster collaboration among businesses, start-ups and professionals, in order to make data analytics an integral part of business innovation and decision making.