It’s known that despite a full shelf of specialized software for sale, most big data initiatives fail. While this doesn’t necessarily mean the tools are inherently terrible, they may serve up data insights that taste like medicine instead of the rich, business-booming dessert people crave.

Simply recognizing data patterns or informing decisions with them is not enough, according to Peter Burris (@plburris, pictured, right), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “There’s a lot of other work that has to go on to ensure that data is presented in a way that’s useful to human beings,” he said.

Some companies are making efforts to pull those missing pieces into their mix. Obviously, some are technology elements. “But it’s also this idea of best practices,” said theCUBE co-host Rebecca Knight (@knightrm, pictured, left). Knight and Burris discussed how data must blend into the human world during the NetApp Insight event in Berlin, Germany. (* Disclosure below.)

What makes data click?

Install big data software; feed data points; generate insight graph; read and inform decision. It’s such a paint-by-numbers process, no wonder many business people put little trust in it. As long as data is presented as a substitute or alternative to natural thinking, people will tend to reject it, according to Burris. Instead, data models need to complement minds and dovetail with them.

“We can look at this impressive show floor and very quickly we have a model of how we’re going to get from point A to point B,” Burris said. “If we we’re looking at that just in data terms, it would remain very confusing — almost like The Matrix.”

Some are at least attempting to synthesize data technology for the real world. “[NetApp Inc.] in particular has been especially aggressive about putting forth this proportion that increasingly companies are data-driven and that therefore they have to take care of the data, they have to treat it differently,” Burris said.

NetApp also teamed up with International Data Corp. on a survey to find out what separates data thrivers from mere survivors. The survey concludes that data thrivers are “enterprises that are aggressively disruptive in the use of digital technologies to affect new markets; ecosystem and feedback is a constant input to business innovation.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of NetApp Insight Berlin. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the NetApp Insight Berlin event. Neither NetApp Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE