Big data quality - whose problem is it?

The increased reliance on data driven enterprise has seen an unprecedented investment in big data initiatives. Organizations averaged US$8M in investments in big data-related initiatives and programs in 2014, with 70% of large enterprises and 56% of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) having already deployed, or planning to deploy, big-data projects [1]. As companies intensify their efforts to get value from big data, the growth in the amount of data being managed continues at an exponential rate, leaving organizations with a massive footprint of unexplored, unfamiliar datasets. On February 8th, 2015, a group of global thought leaders from the database research community outlined the grand challenges in getting value from big data [2]. The key message was the need to develop the capacity to `understand how the quality of data affects the quality of the insight we derive from it'.