Big data management remains a topic at the table for most IT teams. Whether you are preparing a project, in the middle or on to that “next step”, utilizing data – structured or unstructured – to form actionable insights is key to your company’s long term viability and success. Today, let’s look at an article by Thor Olavsrud on CIO that covers a recent big data Survey of enterprise Executives.  What do the executives feel is working?  What challenges do even enterprise-sized businesses face?

First, what is working?

• Strategy – 94% of the executives surveyed are confident their big data strategy is headed in the right direction
• Motivation – 98% of the executives believe they rightfully encourage their employees to ground business decisions in “data and evidence”
• Investment – 81% of those surveyed will increase their investments in talent, tools and technologies that will help the company leverage big data

What are the challenges?

• Data Silos – 41% still report that the data their companies have is too siloed to be easily accessed
• Access – 37% of survey respondents find it can take one day or more to access big data sources to analyze
• Legacy Systems – 59% of executives surveyed find their data storage systems require too much processing time to meet today’s requirements

This survey demonstrates the importance of expanding your big data planning discussions to consider the operations and the daily management.  What are the potential  pain points  when accessing or using the data?  Do current systems or processes limit in any way and what is the solution and what can be done to overcome?  Big data management includes not only the end user capabilities but also those in the middle managing the operation and the systems already in place (or needed) to support.