There are very few demonstrated successes of big data at organizations excluding Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Google, Twitter, etc,.   A recent article Big Data Success: 3 Companies Share Secrets in Information Week, highlights three companies (MetLife, British Airways, and Tivo Research Analytics) developing and implementing big data initiatives.   Some common themes:

1. Size of data doesn’t matter.  Integrating data from different sources and “connecting the dots” can generate substantial business value.
2. Time to value can be short.
3. Business goal-driven big data project instead of data-driven big data project
4. Business sense is as important as data sense.
5. Perfection is the enemy of the good
6. Simple analytics with creative data enrichment/fusion may beat advanced analytics on limited data.

It is heartening to read about such successes and business value generation instead of getting bogged down by how to define Big Data.