David Floyer – Wikibon Founder and Chief Analyst

Big Data has officially gone mainstream, with senior executives at U.S. firms projecting much higher spending on collecting and analyzing high-tech information over the next three years. In addition, companies are increasingly hiring chief data officers to oversee their Big Data projects, according to a new survey.

These are the findings of NewVantage Partner’s newly released Big Data Executive Survey 2014, which says organizations spending at least $10 million on Big Data expect to increase this investment by between 35 and 75 percent in the next four years. Meanwhile, those who have already spent in excess of $50 million on Big Data will ramp things up by between 6 and 28 percent during the same period.

“Big Data was a new topic just a few years ago, with many companies grappling with its role in their organization,” said Randy Bean, CEO and co-founder of NewVantage Partners. “Now, Big Data is largely viewed as a mainstream activity that is an integrated component of how they do business.”

An even more telling statistic perhaps is that some 37 percent of survey respondents said the main sponsor of their Big Data projects is the company CEO, COO or President. That suggests more companies are facing pressure from the very top of the chain to avoid being left behind.

One result of this is more organizations are recruiting a dedicated leader for their Big Data projects. According to the survey, 43 percent of organizations have now employed a Chief Data Officer (CDO) to oversee things. That’s a big jump from the 26 percent of firms which had established a CDO role in 2013.

Driving this thirst for Big Data is one common theme – more than 75 percent of executives surveyed pointed to greater insights and the ability to make informed decisions faster as the main driving force behind their Big Data projects.

With this rise in popularity, very few Big Data skeptics remain. “The level of skepticism [about big data] has dropped significantly since we first conducted this survey in 2012,” noted the report. The old skepticism has been replaced by a determination to get Big Data projects up and running as soon as possible – 74 percent of executives say Big Data merits “serious attention”, while just 3 percent said it was “the same old stuff”.

Despite this rising optimism, organizations need to understand it’s not easy to translate Big Data initiatives into profits. Wikibon’s recent Big Data Analytics Survey 2014 found the average Big Data project returns just 55 cents for every dollar invested, as many organizations struggle to define questions that yield business value, and the right data to analyze.

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