The hardest part of using big data is trying to get business leaders and executives to sit down and define what they want out of the huge amount of unstructured and semi-structured data that is available to enterprises, said Vivek Ratna, a partner with Digital Learning Solutions in Irving, Texas.

"The fault is ours because IT has not articulated as well as we should have what value business can derive," from big data, Ratna said. Many IT organizations are still not collecting or using unstructured data because they are unsure of the business value and not because of technology reasons, he said.

"Unless we can define what value can be derived [from big data] or the business leaders can tell us what value they want to get out of it, we are just playing in the dark," he said.

The sentiments are consistent with those expressed by respondents in a recent survey by market research firm . The survey of 255 IT professionals showed that a majority of companies had no big data plans because they didn't have a specific business case for one.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at or subscribe to . His e-mail address is .