Enterprise CIO Forum community manager John Dodge expounds on political oracle Nate Silver's contention that too much [big] data is not always such a great thing. Dodge also explains why he thinks big data and marketing are soul mates. 

Uncanny political prognosticator (some say "political astrologer") and statistician Nate Silver warns against getting swamped by the trap of too much data.

Metascale is one of many Sears subsidiaries except that it focuses on Big Data born out of running just about "every distributed system...every flavor of data warehouse...and enterprise system you can think of," says Sears CTO and Metascale Phil Shelley.

This is one the best-written and clearest posts about starting out in Big Data that I've read. It was written by Jill Dyché, a VP for SAS Best Practices, author and a former blogger for Information-management.com.

The cloud has arrived. The indicators are there — jargon proliferation, freshly minted corporate titles, resumes peppered with experience in this field, and the ever-present conversation at networking events around cloud strategy.

Big Data has been making noise in almost every facet of corporate America.  From targeted marketing to reducing manufacturing defects, the promise of Big Data seems like the 21st century version of Warbug’s Tincture - a comprehensive, all-inclusive cure to the gross process negligence and overall corporate excesses of the 1990s.  What were you planning on doing with those data warehouses, anyways?  Was all that retained customer data going to be used for anything other than a bull’s-eye for hackers

By enabling Business Intelligence (BI) access to those outside of IT and making it readily available to all, companies have started a veritable data revolution in the best possible sense of the term. BI has become democratized and available to all end users – instead of just a small handful of financial department staffers already well-versed in analytics. This is a tremendous breakthrough because now everyone has easy access to the data required to perform their particular job function – and they don’t have to necessarily acquire new skills to get that data.

I was in a discussion the other day about the state of automation and IT. We started talking using a quadrant chart (much favored by consulting organizations today), that had an axis for data and one for process that looked something like this.

Predicting the future through Systems of Engagement

A recent Forrester paper on The Information-Driven Enterprise asserts that Businesses are increasingly driven by analytics, but disconnects can sabotage the best of Intentions. Forrester’s findings are based on a survey of 154 business technology executives and four North American companies across various industries. The paper provides recommendations on steps enterprises can take to address the challenges outlined.

The upshot of this WSJ Journal guest blog by PwC analysts Chris Curran and Paul Blase is start small, don't fear failure and continually evaluate. I also like the urgency with which they say CIOs should start Big Data projects NOW:

"CIOs don’t have time for doubt-driven delays. They should start experimenting, expect to fail and know that the whole process will spark more questions that will need investigating. Our advice to CIOs: don’t limit yourself and don’t wait."