Over 92% of CIOs have not taken their big data initiatives beyond the planning stage, according to research from Gartner.

While 64% of the 720 organizations surveyed globally have big data investment plans, less than 8% have actually deployed big data technologies. 20% are piloting and experimenting, 18% are developing a strategy and 19% are knowledge gathering.

Media and communications companies appear to be the most active investors in big data technology with 39% having already invested in big data. 34% of banks and 32% of services firms have also already invested.

According to Lisa Kart, research director at Gartner, the survey “underlines the fact that organizations across industries and geographies see ‘opportunity’ and real business value” in big data.

The opportunity may be huge indeed. Monitoring your business processes, employees, customers, suppliers, partners and affiliates in real time generates a great deal of data. With the insights gained from this data, businesses can gain clear competitive advantages, for example:

• Drive growth by reacting to time sensitive and relevant data, fast
• Improve customer retention and satisfaction by anticipating needs
• Reduce the cost of the supply chain through just in time ordering

Add data mined from the Internet, social media and location-based technologies and you have a recipe for success. It is essential however to have the ability to combine the insight gained from big data with real-time capabilities. This combination allows you to turn big data into actionable intelligence immediately, by offering personalized, real-time interactions with your customers. However as customers move around and interact with you, so too does live data flows, so having a bi-directional real-time data distribution strategy is critical. What’s more, you need to distribute data intelligently, removing redundant data and only sending what is important to the customer at that specific moment in time.