There are quite a few articles, reports and presentations which will present Big Data as an hype or fad. In my humble opinion, such comments only shows that folks do not understand Big Data and are ignorant on how to leverage it. Hence, they take the easier path by writing off Big Data as a buzzword.

For those who want to leverage for your business organizations .. here are few things to remember. Big Data is about - “ALL” the data of the business, related to business.  Do you really know what all the data you have? 99% of business only look at data in silos and hence could never realize the full value of this fragmented, transformed and limited data.

- Creating value from data within the scope of extendable business strategy. Do you know what strategy will keep your company competitive and enable growth?

- Iterative play for remaining competitive and innovative.  Many of the Big Data Consultants advise leaders that Big Data is about creating KPIs in an efficient manner, but to be frank, it is not just KPIs. KPIs only help in operating the business in status quo mode. One needs to explore the outliers from the patterns in the data to deploy innovative solutions to improve and create new product and services to gain market share.

- Leveraging agile technologies to create value. There is no reason for not leveraging all the data in today’s technology era.

The failure to leverage Big Data points to the fact that the leadership and  the stake holders have

- No interest in open data culture.  The data and cultural silos provide for power grab and hence they do not want borderless environment in their organization.

- No patience to explore new patterns. Long term win does not come with short term gains. Even in a gold mine, it takes few tons of ore to find few ounces of gold.

- Too much faith in consultants who have no experience in Big Data themselves, and guide them towards creation of data lakes, data ponds.  Data lakes, Data Ponds are nothing but Data Silos just little bigger than normal data warehouses.

When we want to churn the ocean, these consultants provide you a pond or lake thus wasting your resources.

Big Data has so much of similarity with the story written in ~300 B.C. by Vishnu Sharma, in PanchTantra, a classic of Bharat (India). Six blind men were asked to describe an elephant, and each of them describe it differently, based on the part of elephant they touched. Similarly, a confusion is being created in describing Big Data – is it Data, Technology, Algorithms, People, Data Science, or Business Need, etc. However, if we keep it simple, Big Data as “Data” then then see a 360 degree view in proper context, it will easier for businesses to leverage and get value out of Big Data.

Big Data similarity with Elephant and Six Blind Men