Big data has clearly got everybody's attention, from academia to industry. Conservative estimates put the market of big data technologies to nearly 2 billion dollars in 2013. Research Company IDC expects this market to be in excess of 25 billion dollars by 2016. Even more interestingly, GE executives Peter Evans and Marco Annunziata believe that big data will influence over 10 trillion dollars worth of economic benefits to the global economy in less than 2 decades. Every major corporation with interest in this space is setting up multi-million dollar research initiatives with leading institutes and think-tanks.

Big data is radically transforming the way businesses are designed and operate. Now, your business can make sense of a huge volume, velocity, variety, variability of data, and effectively visualize the analysis of this data. Now, you do not have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars or years to get these types of capabilities. Technologies that enable organizations to make sense of big data are significantly reducing the entry barriers for such investments. These new capabilities are fundamentally altering many management practices and impacting all types of companies—small and big, traditional, and new age. Now, start-up companies can offer new insights into customer analytics to large retailers and become multi-million dollar organizations in little or no time. Similarly, traditional large manufacturing companies are focusing on more profitable service segments of their businesses derived from new insights around data and analytics.

Companies today are struggling with figuring out how to take the capabilities and possibilities from one-off initiatives that impact one or some parts of the business to broader usage. Executives are not questioning the value of masses of data; the question in their minds today is how to use it well and amplify its effects. They key lies in weaving big data into the strategic framework of your organization.