Big Data is an ocean of potentially valuable business information. But few companies are successfully navigating that ocean. In fact, in a survey of executives carried out by Oracle, most of them felt that their companies were foundering in the Big Data ocean.
The Oracle big-data survey (PDF), involved telephone and online interviews, in March and April of 2012, with 333 C-suite level executives in the US and Canada. Survey participants were spread across eleven industries groups, ranging from airlines and communications to retail and utilities.
These executives and top-level managers were asked to grade their own firms in how they were harnessing Big Data to meet their business objectives. They did not give themselves high marks.
Fully 60 percent gave their organizations grades of C or lower. Only 8 percent gave themselves A's. Moreover, a remarkable 93 percent of survey respondents believed that they were losing revenue or earning potential due to their inability to convert Big Data into business intelligence. On average they pegged the loss at 14 percent.
Self-graders, particularly among high-powered executives, don't usually flunk themselves at such a high rate.
The survey also provided some insight into what constitutes Big Data, and how rapidly it is getting bigger. Nearly all of the survey respondents (94 percent) reported that they are gathering and handling more business information than they did two years ago. And they pegged data growth at an average 86 percent over those two years.
The biggest explosion of data is in customer information, followed by operations, and sales or marketing. (The sales/marketing category most also involve customer information.) And the toughest challenge – on which executives give themselves the lowest grade – is "translating information into actionable intelligence."
The biggest frustration? Not having the right systems in place to gather the available information and put it to work.
In short, Big Data is here. But organizations and their leaders still lack the tools to put it to work – and are all too aware of that lack. The challenge for IT, and the information industry, is to make better tools available.
The security principles set forth in industry standard ISO/IEC 27002 provide a framework for effective security, built around the cycle of Plan, Do, Check, and Act (PDCA). Many good security products are on the market, but all are designed to meet specific threats – and will not block other threats. At GRT Corp. our security philosophy is built around these words by noted security expert Dr. Bruce Schneier: "Security is not a product, but a process."
