The growing size of transaction volumes, the rise of new technologies (including Hadoop and NoSQL) for processing mountains of data, and the rise of social media and mobile devices as reservoirs of customer information are all reasons behind organizations adopting business intelligence tools in greater numbers, according to a new survey of 600 IT and business professionals by Informatica. Some 70 percent of those surveyed reported a move toward integrating business intelligence into their organizations. However, the degree of implementation varied widely, with 44 percent of that portion of IT pros “considering” a move into Big Data, followed by 22 percent “planning” to introduce some sort of business-intelligence project, 20 percent actually running one, and 13 percent testing one. Around 74 percent of respondents suggested that “management of growing transaction volumes” was the most relevant element of Big Data to their organization, followed by 46 percent who said “new technologies” such as Hadoop and NoSQL. Management of social-media data, mobile device data and machine-generated data (at 35 percent, 31 percent and 22 percent, respectively) rounded out that top five. Respondents generally viewed Big Data as a way to drive business (71 percent), add flexibility to their operations (51 percent), introduce new products and services (50 percent), attract and retain customers (49 percent), enhance analytics (47 percent) and lower IT costs via technology (38 percent). In other words, pretty much everything. “Lack of maturity in big data tools is the top challenge (52 percent) that respondents face in big data projects, including a lack of support for reuse and metadata in current Hadoop environments,” read a May 14 note outlining the data. “Lack of support for real-time streaming data is another key challenge (39 percent), followed by concerns over poor data quality (38 percent), data security and privacy (38 percent) and the limited availability of skilled developers to manage big data (35 percent).” Difficulty developing for Hadoop and lack of “data governance capabilities” also ranked in the list of top concerns and challenges. Informatica’s data mirrors the recent conclusions reached by analysis firms such as Gartner, which pretty much uniformly suggest that companies are turning to business intelligence as a way to squeeze more value from their data. In an April research note, Gartner analyst Dan Sommer concluded that business intelligence would remain the number-one technology priority for executives and CIOs throughout 2012. Image: gualtiero boffi/Shutterstock.com