What everyone is doing wrong about Big Data

I saw so many Big Data “initiatives” in the last month in companies. And guess what? Most of them failed either completely or simply didn’t deliver the results expected. A recent Gartner study even mentioned that only 20% of Hadoop projects are put “live”. But why do these projects fail? What is everyone doing wrong?
Whenever customers are coming to me, they “heard” of what Big Data can help them with. So they looked at 1-3 use cases and now want to have them put into production. However, this is where the problem starts: they are not aware of the fact that also Big Data needs a strategic approach. To get this right, it is necessary to understand the industry (e.g. TelCo, Banking, …) and associated opportunities. To achieve that, a Big Data roadmap has to be built. This is normally done in a couple of workshops with the business. This roadmap will then outline what projects are done in what priority and how to measure results. Therefore, we have a Business Value Framework for different industries, where possible projects are defined.
The other thing I often see is that customers come and say: so now we built a data lake. What should we do with it? We simply can’t find value in our data. This is a totally wrong approach. We often talk about the data lake, but it is not as easy as IT marketing tells us; whenever you build a data lake, you first have to think about what you want to do with it. Why should you know what you might find if you don’t really know what you are looking for? Ever tried searching “something”? If you have no strategy, it is worth nothing and you will find nothing. Therefore, a data lake makes sense, but you need to know what you want to build on top of it. Building a data lake for Big Data is like buying bricks for a house – without knowing where you gonna construct that house and without knowing what the house should finally look like. However, a data lake is necessary to provide great analytics and to run projects on top of that.

 
Summing it up, what is necessary for Big Data is to have a clear strategy and vision in place. If you fail to do so, you will end up like many others – being desperate about the promises that didn’t turn out to be true.