OREANDA-NEWS. The toughest challenges for businesses implementing Big Data initiatives is getting different business units to share information across organisational silos and determining what data to use for different business decisions, according to The Emerging Big Returns from Big Data global trend report. These two cultural challenges were being closely followed by the technological challenge of being able to handle the large volume, velocity and variety of Big Data1. Commissioned by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the leading IT services, consulting and business solutions firm, the research also reveals how the Big Data leaders2 differ from the laggards3 and the returns business are expecting.

Satya Ramaswamy, vice president and global head of Mobility and Next Gen Solutions in TCS commented, “Big Data has enormous potential and early adopters are projecting a high return on investments. However, overcoming the technological challenges is only part of the story. Businesses need to carefully think where Big Data initiatives should sit within the organisation, how to break down internal silos and look beyond just internal and structured data sets. To realise the full potential of Big Data, businesses also need to consider the potential cultural changes within the organisation to speed-up its adoption.”

Leaders and laggards

Leaders in Big Data differ most from the laggards in three main ways – where they analyse and process Big Data, the mix of data they use and their Big Data spend.

Leaders in Big Data are doing analysis outside of business units (BUs), 79 percent of them are using the IT function or a separate Big Data team, with only 21 percent doing the analysis in BUs. The laggards on the other hand are doing only 68 percent of their analysis outside of the BUs.

The leaders are also using more unstructured and semi-structured data (55 percent), and external data (37 percent), than the laggards who are using 46 percent unstructured and semi-structured data, and 26 percent external data.

The most marked difference is that leaders spent USD 24 million in 2012 and expect to spend USD 26 million by 2015, whereas the laggards spent USD 7 million in 2012 and expect to spend USD 13 million by 2015.

Regardless of whether they’re leaders or laggards, nearly half (44 percent) of Big Data investments are going to business functions on the revenue side – sales, marketing and R&D / new product development. Much less (24 percent) is going to back-office functions – IT, finance and HR.

US shows widest adoption of Big Data initiatives

A regional breakdown shows that US companies are leading adoption of Big Data initiatives (68 percent), followed by Latin America (51 percent), Europe (45 percent) and Asia Pacific (39 percent).

Retailers lead the pack in Big Data

Despite the challenges and disparity in success, many businesses are confident of high ROIs from Big Data. Of those that had programmes in 2012, 43 percent predicted an ROI of more than 25 percent in 2012. Retail businesses have the greatest number of leaders in Big Data with 35 percent of respondents expecting ROIs greater than 50 percent in 2012. They were closely followed by energy and resources (33 percent), banking and financial services (33 percent), high tech (27 percent), and media and entertainment (25 percent). In last place were consumer goods businesses with just 17 percent expecting ROIs greater than 50 percent in 2012.

Aside from the vertical disparity, geographies also differ greatly in their ROI predictions. Asia-Pacific expected the highest ROI (71 percent), followed by Latin America (64 percent) and Europe (43 percent). The lowest expect ROI was in the US (37 percent).