Big Data is becoming well-established at big organizations. But it is coming rapidly to other orgs as well: small-to-medium business (SMB), non-profits of modest size, and to larger-scale endeavors that have heretofore overlooked its full exploitation. If your organization’s enterprise has not yet captured the advantages in leveraging Big Data, it’s time to at least get familiar with the concept, and to get it onto your planning schedule.

Big Data reigns in data that has become too big and too disparate: The days are fast closing for any organization that harbors data in a surfeit of discreet systems. That is, vertically isolated databases – “silos” supporting disparate enterprise, core-business, systems such as e-mail systems, accounting systems, personnel systems (HR), order systems, discreet CRM, competitor info, and so forth. Big Data shatters walls and allows inclusive datasets in response to queries and calls for comprehensive information regarding specific entities and related requirements: clients, competitors, concepts, projects, analysis, forecasts, compliance, reportage to regulatory agencies… name any type of informing content (information) that your organization has, and Big Data serves up that information in a cohesive and comprehensive manner.

Big Data serves Business Intelligence, and BI is huge. BI essentially is the intelligent use of data that is leveraged across and through dispersed systems. BI helps to prevent the delivery of incomplete content, when attempting to serve specific needs. Otherwise, business forecasting suffers, analysis suffers, forward progressions suffer; survey, reporting, and intelligent thinking are ill-served by virtue of the fact that much data gets overlooked – it’s hidden.

The challenges are hardly new – consider:

“The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
~ Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Indeed, Sherlock: “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
~ A Scandal in Bohemia

“Data! Data! Data!… I can’t make bricks without clay.”
~ The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

Your bricks – reports, analysis, forecastings, projects, progressions, products, services, deliveries – require more than data. They require complete data.

You need BIG DATA – paired with its intelligent use.