Big data is driving new forms of competition, new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and providing unique ways to interact with customers. Big data is comprised of a wealth of unstructured data that is being transmitted and captured by organizations to enhance business intelligence efforts. The forms that big data takes include text, video, voice, location data, social media, and its growth is exponential. Big data encompasses multiple dimensions, including volume, variety, velocity, veracity, variability, and complexity. Despite the opportunities that big data presents, organizations are having difficulty managing it, especially in the areas of data management and data governance. Executive involvement is critical to insuring quality data for business intelligence as well as to insure that their firms will be able to attract the necessary talent to effectively engage in BI analytics. It is recommended that management take a common sense approach to dealing with big data to insure that data-driven decision-making is not compromised.