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Survey Identifies Top 3 Challenges to Big Data Adoption

• By Rhea Kelly
• 12/04/13

While big data analysis is increasingly seen as an essential capability, 60 percent of surveyed organizations have only limited capability in business intelligence (BI) reporting, according to a new survey from the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), a nonprofit organization that provides independent research, education and certification programs to information professionals. Research for the report was underwritten in part by Datawatch and IBM; survey respondents came from a variety of business sectors, including government, finance and education.

Sixty-five percent of respondents admitted their organizations have a "somewhat disorganized" approach to content management. In the complex world of big data analytics, warns AIIM, organizations often have vast quantities of "dark data" (data that lacks any control or classification) that could hold valuable business intelligence.

"Big data potentially holds huge insight for organizations, but the mass of 'dark data' could impact the ability to extract that insight effectively," said Doug Miles, director market intelligence at AIIM, in a prepared statement. "Businesses should look to harness their information, and combine it across disparate systems as a precursor to their big data journey."

The report identified three major challenges to big data adoption:

1. Difficulty of connecting structured transactional datasets to unstructured data or text-based content;
2. Lack of skilled users to work with big data toolsets; and
3. Security and privacy concerns.

Other key findings in the AIIM research report include:

• 60 percent of early users consider the ROI for their big data initiatives to be good (excluding those who are still in the assessment phase), but 30 percent are less certain of the ROI due to high technology and expertise costs;
• Over 50 percent of respondents are successfully feeding the results into decision-making;
• 34 percent see that big data will be an essential capability for their business; and
• 16 percent have already invested in big data analytics tools.

The full report can be downloaded from the AIIM site.