The hype surrounding big data risks masking how useful exploiting it could be to the enterprise. That's according Stuart Birrell, CIO of the McLaren Group, a group of companies based around the McLaren Mercedes Formula 1 team.
"The marketing boys are in danger of generating huge amounts of cynicism. It's a bit like SOA [Service Oriented Architecture] 10 years ago, a bit like Y2K 10 years ago, there's lots of hype around it," he told Computing.
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"There's lots of good stuff sitting behind it and many companies and businesses are very low on the maturity curve, shall we say, on how we generate and handle data to generate those meaningful insights."
More positively however, Birrell believes the hype surrounding big data means those at board level are now taking an interest, which provides an opportunity for IT to demonstrate how it can actually help the business.
"Lots of people collect lots of data, but how do you get to the meaningful insight and actions coming out of that data? If nothing else, the hype is raising awareness at not just the IT level, but across the business," he said.
"When you get your chief executives and chief marketing officers talking about big data, you open the door to having a smart sensible conversation with them about what do they want to do, what do they not know about their business that we can help them with," Birrell continued.
"And so it's a double edged sword: I think big data is amassing hype, but I think it is an education process with the wider business. And in that respect it's worth jumping on the bandwagon if it opens the doors to do really smart things with the data."
Ultimately, for McLaren, it's deciding how to gain benefits from the colossal amounts of data they collect, especially during Formula 1 race weekends, which is the definitive question.
"We've all spent years generating it with SAPs, Oracles and ERPs, lots of data, but what do you do with it? That's always been the perpetual challenge," Birrell added.