Whenever there is a major project happening in your business, you will typically see one or a series of e-mails from your leaders, you might see a poster or two, a few trinkets or artifacts here and there, attend a few town-hall meetings, and read about it on your company's intranet. The primary purpose of all of these is to tell you and other employees about the project, get you engaged, and talk about the benefits of the project.

In the case of Big Data initiatives, you need to do more. There are three primary reasons for that:

This is a new subject and is heavily laced with technology and advanced statistics.

You want people to develop a better understanding so that they are adequately engaged and can apply the capabilities correctly. Otherwise, like a lot of other technology initiatives, many of the new capabilities will get developed but adapting those capabilities will be difficult after the initial euphoria. In this process, you might miss...