"Most” organizations are embracing big data. For instance, a 2013 Gartner survey found that 64 percent of enterprises were deploying or planning big data projects, up from 58% the year before.

Those numbers simply don't fit with what I’m seeing, and I suspect that I'm hardly alone. (By way of background, I spent a great deal of time researching big data for my last two books.) I would wager that for every Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and Google, there are thousands of mid-sized and large organizations that are doing very little or nothing with big data.

Why the lack of implementation? Many reasons come to mind, not the least of which is that the incessant noise around big data from social media intimidates and confuses people. The hype cycle is in full swing.

Big questions

Many CXOs are left not knowing where to begin. They are asking themselves questions such as:

• Should we start small or large?
• Is big data just another  IT project that can be run by a unit head?
• Or is it something so vast and nebulous that it needs to be fully backed by the people at the top of the organization?
• If the former, should we rent data scientists on sites like Kaggle? If the latter, how can the entire organization embrace around big data?

These are not simple questions to answer. Yes, starting small sounds appealingly low-risk, but making sense out of big data isn't simple. Translation: It’s definitely not just another IT project, and new tools are required. Traditional business intelligence applications simply can’t handle petabytes of unstructured data. What's more, big data does not lend itself to the usual discussions about return on investment. (For more on this, see my rant on big data ROI.)

Management at companies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Netflix understand perhaps the key ingredient of big data: uncertainty. That is, that you don’t know exactly where big data is going to take you. An organization might quickly find critical employee or customer insights. Or myths might be debunked. Perhaps it had the wrong impression about its customers’ behaviors and interests all along. And, maybe most scary yet, it might find nothing of interest – at least not yet.

Simon says

The relatively few companies such that have achieved new insights from big data have been working with massive amounts of data for more than a decade. During that time, they’ve methodically built up their internal data-discovery and -management capabilities. No company can expect to go from zero to Google overnight.

An organization needs to accept reality: implementing big data is a large, multifaceted endeavor. It requires full support of the leadership and the commitment of everyone in the organization. Beyond that, consider the following:

• Start thinking about big data in new ways.
• Ignore the temptation to try and precisely quantify its ROI. 
• Finally, investments in new tools are essential. 

Feedback

What say you?