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Veracity. Companies need to be able to trust the information used to make deci-

sions in terms of source, accuracy and relevance. With Big Data involving data from 

different sources, often presented as models, there is a danger that it may not be 

believed and so not be in the right format to support decisions.

The growth in volume of data enabled by Big Data has become possible through 

more forms of instrumentation that captures ‘events’ through time, according to 

Eaton et al. (2012), which can be integrated into systems. This instrumentation can 

be simply data collection where the events are a sequence of customer interac-

tions with a business through its desktop or mobile site or social media, for example 

through web analytics or social analytics. From an e-commerce and online market-

ing perspective, understanding the sequence of events is important to understand 

whether investments in media investments or building multichannel experiences is 

important. Machine-to-machine interconnection is also commonly involved in data 

collection; for example, sensors on cars or GPS tracking of items in supply chain 

systems are collated centrally. Eaton et al. (2012) note that Big Data systems such as 

Hadoop tend to be more likely to process unstructured data which doesn’t need to 

be cleansed in comparison with traditional data warehouses which are highly struc-

tured with data integrity enforced.

What, then, is the scope of Big Data applications? Andy Mendelsohn, Senior VP of 

Database Server Technologies at Oracle, explains it this way:

Today, we have our information systems for business intelligence, and people call 

them data marts and data warehouses, and they’re loaded with all this transactional 

information from our transaction processing systems like E-Business Suite and 

other application vendors. And that information is really valuable, the crown jewels 

of the company, that transactional data. It’s not going away. So what’s really impor-

tant about Big Data is to understand there’s a lot of this data, most of it’s completely 

worthless to the business, but there are these gems, these nuggets of information, 

like the fact that a customer just had a baby. You want to take that information, you 

want to integrate it to your existing transactional data that you’ve got in your data 

warehouse and really use that to make better business decisions and make more 

money for your company.