Big, as usual, is a misnomer as the completeness of data is key to optimal decision-making. And complete means not just all the critical structured and unstructured data to inform decision makers but the accuracy and recency of such data. Good checklist here to help analytics and BI practitioners but make sure to practise the opposite of the claims
Data analysts are the new gods of the Information Age. A good analyst can be worth his weight in gold for a company, but I believe big data tools will start trending more toward self-service, bypassing the analyst or analytics team, and providing more tools to allow the line-of-business user to make his or her own choices.