Published on the 04/07/2013 | Written by Newsdesk

Three quarters of Australian and New Zealand organisations claim to use big data analytics for better insight and decision support, yet so far only a handful are reporting any great success…

The big data spark was ignited back in 2011 when the World Economic Forum declared data was the “new oil”. Analyst McKinsey & Co then predicted that some businesses could expect margin boosts of up to 60 percent thanks to better big data exploitation.

The practice has yet to match the rhetoric for many organisations.

A new report from consultant Fifth Quadrant found that although Australian and New Zealand businesses were overwhelmingly supportive of big data to aid decision making, improve the customer experience, boost financials and drive competitive advantage, 53 percent reported that their attempts to leverage big data to improve the customer experience have failed. Only one in eight described their big data adventures as “extremely successful”.

Fifth Quadrant’s report Big Data or Big Hype? found that despite the apparent enthusiasm only 31 percent of respondents were actually using big data and analytics to inform strategic decisions, fewer again consider big data a core business initiative.

Part of the issue may be the term itself. The Oxford English Dictionary has only just embraced the term in its June dictionary update, but its definition isn’t really that much help: “Computing data of a very large size, typically to the extent that its manipulation and management present significant logistical challenges; (also) the branch of computing involving such data.”

As data reserves continue to grow, just about every organisation may think it has this sort of “big data”. But a couple of petabytes of static storage is not big data. The term is better reserved not solely for large volumes of data, but data of a wide variety collected at high velocity – from sensors, from social network feeds, from smartphones.

Telecommunications companies, banks, retailers and Governments (witness Prism) are among the earliest adopters.

Technology analyst Ovum this week also released a report into big data adoption by telecommunications companies. It found that entrenched corporate structures were inhibiting the roll out of effective big data initiatives, as was the paucity of skills in the field even though big data potentially holds the key to reduced churn and increased ARPU (average revenue per customer) for telcos.

Nevertheless Ovum predicts that demand for big data analytics in all sectors will continue to grow and create a market worth US$7.7bn by 2018 as organisations invest in tools and services to liberate value from their data.