Why big data isn't always the answer

Listen to much of the well-peddled advice in the enterprise tech world today, and you'd have to be excused for coming away with the belief that "big data" holds all the answers your company is looking for. Too bad it often can't live up to that promise -- at least, not in its traditional form. Turns out, what's commonly referred to as big data -- all those vast "lakes" of numerical measures captured by the enterprise resource planning (ERP), consumer relationship management (CRM) and other business systems so enthusiastically mined by today's analytics tools -- actually amounts to only 10 percent of the data an average company has at its fingertips, according to IDC. The rest is "unstructured" or "qualitative" data, and it can be messy. Included in this type is information from customer surveys, response forms, online forums, social media, documents, videos, news reports, phone calls to call centers and anecdotal evidence gathered by the sales team, to name just a few examples.