Today companies struggle with a volume of information that has the force of a tidal wave. You can either float or sink into that wave, depending on whether or not you can leverage the exponential growth of business data.
The current thinking around big data though, tends to be built around a very simplistic model. According to that, you acquire large amounts of data in lots of formats from various sources. Then apply some business intelligence into that mix and get your solution. However, this data has to make sense and be as simple as possible.