A conversation with John Hagerty, Program Director of Big Data and Analytics solutions at IBM who discusses how organizations can thrive once they understand how to harness and use Big Data. He looks at Big Data through the lens of the 4 V's: Volume, Veracity, Velocity and Variety and provides guidance on how understanding them can help organizations. He explores the cultural shift of gut instinct decisions to trusting the insights from analytics and making informed decisions based on that trust of the data. The future of Big Data and Analytics will come with cognitive systems that rely on learning from data to provide better recommendations, and soon companies will realize to function successfully they will need to make Big Data the center piece of their business.