I have very little doubt that many CXOs will dismiss Big Data because they realize that they can’t get all of the data. They are ignoring Big Data for many reasons. Perhaps most glaring: because they know that they are probably missing something, perhaps something big. They can’t be absolutely sure that they are analyzing and interpreting all of data–or the right data. So they demur.

Historically, many organizations have been able to capture every (internal) transaction, every check, and every journal entry. Small Data is like that. Remember, Small Data is largely internal to the enterprise. There’s a great deal of control and data governance involved–a great deal of proper data management.

Big Data is different.

Big Data is different. It’s mostly external to the enterprise. It is fundamentally unmanageable, at least in the traditional sense.

There’s no recipe for harnessing the power of Big Data, but the leaders of the companies that I researched in writing Too Big to Ignore understood the limits of their own internal controls. Yet they embraced Big Data anyway. They know that you can’t stop someone from writing a review, tweeting, uploading a video, slamming you on Facebook, etc. New data sources like Pinterest spring up seemingly overnight.

Simon Says

Can’t get “all” of the data? So what. Embrace Big Data anyway.