Those were just some examples used by Shaun Lester, director of SAP AG's business intelligence centre of excellence, to illustrate how technological improvements and the emergence of the Web have led to a huge explosion of data.

"The good news is that the majority of this information is digital, which means we can look into this information and do some analytics on it," said Lester to an audience of IT pros at the SAP Solutions Tour on its Toronto stop.

But the challenge for organizations is that they at once suffer from too little and too much data, said Lester. Businesses are drowning in information, but it's not the right kind, and business users aren't getting the access to the data they need because it's siloed.

"This leads to rock, paper, scissors, making gut decisions," said Lester.

While organizations are spending a lot of money on business analytics, Lester said there still isn't much governance for sharing and managing data. "Instead of finding the needle in the haystack, they just create more hay," he said.