What it means is that at some point, these are the hot issues and the majority of businesses are, or will be talking about them during the year. The tipping point for me was the briefing conducted by Intuit CEO Brad Smith in December in which he talked about big data being more important to small businesses than big businesses. And it’s hard to miss the phrase big data popping up on the web page of virtually any company that considers itself a technology company. It's never clear that these "Years of" are technology issues, or reflect that businesses have found a hook for the year’s marketing campaign. Everybody wants something new and hot so we’ve rapidly gone through social media, mobile, and the cloud and it’s time for the latest new kid in town to have 12 months in the spot light. Come to think of it, sitting here with a year old computer with a 1TB of storage, almost everyone is dealing with big data - much of it unstructured - because we have devices that can hold it. As we all know from Scott's Law of Storage (which was just invented) that data expands to occupy available storage.