Big Data Technology: Challenges, Prospects, and Realities

We attempt to demonstrate the value of big data to enterprises by interweaving the perceptions, challenges, and opportunities of big data for businesses. While enterprises are aware of the value of big data to their businesses, there are challenges of exploiting big data in terms of data quality and usage. Executives might lack knowledge on how applications are related to one another in the big data ecosystem and the business benefits to reap. We summarize the results of a research study that explores emerging business perceptions of big data. We examine the current practice in 20 large enterprises, each having an annual revenue of more than USD 0.5 billion and present our findings related to executive perceptions. We provide insights on how firms can develop their big data expertise along various dimensions and identify critical ideas to be further investigated to better understand the issues that practitioners and researchers might be equally grappling with.