An advertising agency met with a client—who happened to be a U.S. Marine Corps colonel—and the conversation turned to the topic of reliable data. “Look,” said the colonel, “if I’m on a battlefield trying to defend a hill and I get a piece of intelligence, even if I’m not 100 percent sure that it’s accurate, I will make decisions based on that intelligence.” He strongly believed that it’s better to have some information than none—and that you’d be a fool to disregard it just because it falls short of being definitive. One could say that the colonel was a proponent of “little data.”
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To read the original article: When Big Data Isn’t an Option
