Big data become the norm, but...

If we consider the trend in any sector, big data became popular since the 2005 and today is cosidered one of the possibility to compete more effectively by analyzing and create value from data especially from the customer (e.g. Davenport & Harris, 2007).

Enterprise companies, small organizations, startup are analyzing data tring to follow the path opened by the biggest, such as IBM, Amazon, Google, and Netflix.

But the majority of these companies are struggleing to understand how to get value from this data. In worst cases companies become disappointed about their effort regarding the investinents on big data analytics as we already seen around 1990's on the discusson about CRM (customer Relation Management) application. The first consensun arrived twenty years later (Buttle 2009). At that time CRM became famous in IT sector but the idea to "put the customer/client in the center" was far from the strategic boards. The same may happen with big data. Moreover, big data developments have stirred up vigorous discussion and public concern on privacy issues (es. Snowden, Cambridge Analitica...).

The problems with creating value from big data mainly is due to a lack of knowledge and skills on how to analyze and use these big customer data. In addition, companies might over estimate the benefits of big data (Meer, 2013). One important danger is that firms start too optimistically and start thinking “too big”, while actually lacking decent knowledge on the basics and challenges of good data analysis of already existing data, such as CRM and survey data, and how this can contribute to business performance.

Comapnies are starting large-scale big data projects with rather difficult data mining and computer science techniques and software programs, without a proper definition of the objectives of these projects and the underlying statistical techniques.

As a consequence, lots of companies invest heavily in big data but are likely to face a negative return of their big data investments.

1. The Dark Side of Customer Analytics - Davenport & Harris, 2007

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas_Davenport2/publication/228386781_The_dark_side_of_customer_analytics/links/53db939f0cf2a76fb667a583.pdf