As a small business with a significant number of employees who travel extensively, these numbers from the Australian Sunday Herald came as a bit of a shock:

Recent research shows more than half of Australian businesses (55.3 per cent) believe that merely having the cost of roaming in mind when travelling impacts employee productivity. For small-to-medium sized companies, this was more relevant when compared to larger organisations (62.2 per cent versus 49.0 per cent).

But it goes one step further. The research indicates nearly half (49.6 per cent) of employees are unlikely to call or text colleagues who are travelling internationally due to the high costs and complexity of roaming. So not only do we limit our own communication when we travel, our colleagues back home are less likely to communicate with us.

Perhaps there is something to limiting phone calls, but there are factors like time zones in play as well.  But limiting texting?  Thought-provoking.

Harvard Business Review has two posts on big data that are relevant to our ongoing discussions and worth reading: Karen Mills, former head of the SBA, suggests that it might be used to tackle small business lending concerns:

...as new entrants increasingly experiment with cash-flow and direct-deposit data as a means of better predicting the ability of a small business to repay its loans, those with easy access to that data could have a real advantage.

Bechara Choucair, Jay Bhatt and Raed Mansour in a joint article address the ways that big data can be a boon to public health incentives in urban centers:

There is a great opportunity in public health to use analytics to promote data-driven policies. We need to use our data better, share it with the public and our partners, and then leverage that data to create better policies, systems and environmental changes.

Interesting news on the state of veteran-owned business from Allissa Kline at  Business First:

Government-guaranteed lending to veteran-owned businesses declined more than 33 percent through July, but the number of local banks making loans to veterans has doubled.

The U.S. Small Business Administration’s Buffalo District Office reported 24 loan approvals to veterans for the first 10 months of federal fiscal year 2014, compared to 36 such loans for the same time frame in 2013. The total dollar volume has also declined, shifting from $6.9 million a year ago to $5.7 million as of July 31.

Standby Talent has a concise post about the intersection of staffing and big data.

There are a variety of ways that big data can assist with the recruiting process. This is why it is becoming so popular. Some of the most common ways that it assists with the recruiting process are listed below:

• Cost per hire by source – This allows the organization to monitor the ROI for their sourcing and recruiting activitie
• Time to fill by position title – This allows the organization to know how long it takes them to fill various positions. Therefore, they can see understand the talent supply and demand
• Requisitions per recruiter per month – This allows them to see which recruiter is capable of handling hefty workloads.