Yeah, it’s pretty common that when a new innovation comes out people create a hype that the innovation will magically solve all of their business problems. Of course, it doesn’t work that way, because it’s always the smart people (in your organization) who you will need to solve your problems. Technology is merely an enabler that increases the reach / capability / efficiency / etc.
Bottom line is that businesses really need smart people (who have a lot of insight, experience, and problem/domain internalization) who can *think*, *comprehend*, *convince stakeholders*, and then *build* the optimal solution—only then can you fix your business problems.
It’s a lot easier to buy big data solutions out there than it is to procure smart people, and hence the hype… 🙂
Also think about big data relying on the volume of data driven by variety and velocity being of good quality. Without standardization, shared metadata, de-duplication, how would any analytical fact and dimension tables get populated to render trustworthy reporting and predictive analytics. This requires a cleanup and ongoing governance to keep it clean, ideally at the source level. Moreover, while big data is a nice hype right now, it has existed in many industries relying on large volume from many legacy sources for years, eg telco, utilities, oil and gas and investment banking. Lastly, often you may need very little data to make adequate decisions so before throwing around big data concepts, the business’ use case needs to be understood sufficiently.