Tapping Big Data's strengths, avoiding data quality weaknesses

While Big Data promises a new and more intelligent means of marketing, serving customers, tracking financial and healthcare information and more, it will fail to deliver without data quality, USA Today reports.

"The only problem is that a lot of the Big Data isn't really data," anthropologist Robert Albro of American University told the news outlet. "It's a mash-up of all kinds of numbers that started out as data, but they don't necessarily mean anything once they have been removed from where they started out."

That problem means companies will need to adopt data quality tools and develop governance policies that enable their employees to verify, validate and clean up all the different kinds of information that is collected.

A recent study from Capgemini's Economist Intelligence Unit found that out of more than 600 business leaders around the world, approximately 90 percent said they would have made better decisions over the last three years if they had access to "all the relevant information." Despite this finding, 55 percent said managing Big Data was not included in strategy by senior leaders.