We have previously written about the importance of discipline in terms of art like Big Data. There are plenty of indications that more discipline and rigor is required on how we use the term. To date, our key message has been that it is the enterprise CTO who is responsible for defining how the term should be used. We still believe that.
We have also always supported using the community-edited site Wikipedia’s entry on Big Data as a starting point for a Big Data definition. The definition I put there was morphed and edited by the community pretty significantly, but that is just the nature of the beast. The end result of a collaborative site like that is usually far better than if a single person had created a definition so it is definitely worth checking out as you determine how to use the Big Data term in your enterprise.