Big Data Trends for 2014

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Last week, I consolidated several Big Data vendors' predictions about what to expect in the Big Data world in 2014. This week, we will take a look at what Big Data customers think. IDG Enterprise conducted a study to gain a better understanding of organizations' big data initiatives, investments and strategies. In their 2014 IDG Enterprise Big Data Study, they asked 751 IT decision-makers about their views on how they are using Big Data in their companies. A summary report of this study appears at the end of the post.

Some study highlights include:

Big Data Behemoth Continues to Grow

Of companies with Big Data initiatives, 53% say that these initiatives are critical or a high priority to their organization. Also:

• Over the next 12 months, enterprise companies will spend around $8M on big data-related initiatives.
• Also, these companies' IT budgets around Big Data initiatives will increase somewhat (57%) and significantly (14%) over the next 12-18 months.

Enterprises Invest in Big Data Solutions Yet Don't See Improvements in Decision-Making

Enterprises look to Big Data to improve decision-making quality and speed. They are trying to get value from their Big Data initiatives by investing in data-analytic solutions that focus on ways to uncover insights as well as visualizing their data. Yet, most enterprises have yet to realize any positive impact impact on their decision-making abilities.

• To gain value from their data, enterprises are primarily investing in solutions around: Data analytics (55%), Data mining (50%) and Data visualization (42%).
• Companies invest in Big Data initiatives to improve the quality (59% say it is driving Big Data investment) and speed (53%) of decision-making.
• However, only 23% of companies say that big data initiatives are positively impacting the quality or speed.

Emails, Not Social Media, are a Common Big Data Source

Companies have many different sources of data at their disposal. Despite all the talk about use of social media sources as a way to get deeper customer insights:

• Only 24% of the companies say Social Media is a common source of "big data" for their organization.
• Instead, 51% of companies say that Emails are a common data source, followed by Customer Databases (49%); Online Portals (37%); Word Documents (36%) and  Transactional Data (32%).

Non-Technical Factors are Key to Big Data Success

In addition to the technological nuts and bolts behind Big Data initiatives, enterprises need to be mindful of non-technological aspects of their Big Data initiatives. Here are a few.

• Fifty-five percent of IT executives believe integration of Big Data initiatives into their organization's business culture is very or extremely challenging.
• Seventy-two percent of companies think that making sure the human capital (i.e., knowledge workers, data scientists) exists within the company to effectively extract value from big data initiatives is very important to critical.
• Big Data strategies in enterprise companies are typically lead by IT-focused (53%) rather than Business-focused management (34%).

Big Data Skills Shortage Still a Roadblock to Success

• Limited availability of skilled employees to analyze (41%) or manage (41%) big data are the top challenges that organizations face in their Big Data initiatives, closely followed by limited budget (40%)
• Only 26% of IT executives cite ROI as an obstacle to their Big Data initiatives.

The 2014 IDG Enterprise Big Data Study contains a lot more insights. For some insights, take a look at the summary below. To get the entire report, contact Sue Yanovitch. The entire report is worth a read.