Technology vendors and industry analysts tout the enormous business benefits that enterprises can gain from mashing up traditional structured data with unstructured data from the cloud, mobile devices, social media channels and other sources. But business executives have little idea of how to take advantage of big data or how to articulate their requirements to IT, according to several executives at the show.

Business leaders often "don't know what they don't know," said one frustrated IT manager, and therefore they are incapable of explaining to IT shops what to do with all this data that's being accumulated.

Over the past couple of years, private investors and venture capital firms have into startups developing new technologies for collecting, storing, organizing and analyzing petabyte-scale volumes of structured and unstructured data.

The tools have made it easier than ever for companies to pull in data from web logs, clickstreams, social media, video and audio files, machine sensors and micro-blogging sites such as .

The real challenge is not the technology, but finding business value out of all the data that can be collected, said Reid Nuttall, CIO of OGE Energy, an Oklahoma City-based energy company.