With a cornucopia of literature on Big Data and Data Analytics it has become a recent buzzword. The literature is full of hymns of praise for big data, and its potential applications. However, some of the latest published material exposes the challenges involved in implementing Big Data (BD) approach, where the uncertainty surrounding its applications is rendering it ineffective. The paper looks at the mind-sets and perspective of executives and their plans for using Big Data for decision making. Our data collection involved interviewing senior executives from a number of world class organisations in order to determine their understanding of big data, its limitations and applications. By using the information gathered by this is used to analyse how well executives understand big data and how well organisations are ready to use it effectively for decision making. The aim is to provide a realistic outlook on the usefulness of this technology and help organisations to make suitable and realistic decisions on its investment. Professionals and academics are becoming increasingly interested in the field of big data (BD) and data analytics. Companies invest heavily into acquiring data, and analysing it. More recently the focus has switched towards data available through the internet which appears to have brought about new data collection opportunities. As the smartphone market developed further, data sources extended to include those from mobile and sensor networks. Consequently, organisations started using the data and analysing it. Thus, the field of business intelligence emerged, which deals with gathering data, and analysing it to gain insights and use them to make decisions (Chen, et al., 2012). BD is seem to have a huge immense potential to provide powerful information businesses. Accenture claims (2015) that organisations are extremely satisfied with their BD projects concerned with enhancing their customer reach. Davenport (2006) has presented applications in which companies are using the power of data analytics to consistently predict behaviours and develop applications that enable them to unearth important yet difficult to see customer preferences, and evolve rapidly to generate revenues.

As big data (BD) and data analytics having gain significance the industry expects helping executives will eventually move towards evidence based decision making. The hope is to achieve more sustainable competitive advantage for their organisations. A key question is whether executives make decisions by intuition. This leads to another question whether big data would ever substitute human intuition. In this research, the ‘mind-set’ of executives about application and limitations of big data be investigated by taking into account their decision making behaviour. The aim is to look deeply into how BD technologies facilitate greater intuitiveness in executives, and consequently lead to faster and sustainable business growth.

As big data (BD) and data analytics gain significance in Europe, the industry expects that executives will eventually move towards evidence based decision making, and consequently would build sustainable competitive advantages for their organisations. Therefore, the lessons learned from experiences of European executives can be key for human development and also economic development. However, it also seems that in some cases decision makers in Europe seem to not use business intelligence systems at all. Since, executives are intelligent human beings with credible and proven expertise, it seems to raise a question mark on effectiveness of business intelligence systems, and the potential it has in human and economic development. Furthermore, repeated evaluation of literature pointed out that ultimately executives in Europe make decisions by intuition, and this leads to the question whether big data would ever replace intuition. In this paper, the mind-sets of executives about application and limitations of big data have been explored, by taking into account the cognitive factors in decision making. By using this, it is evaluated whether BD technologies can use to accelerate intuition development of the executives, and consequently lead to faster and sustainable economic development in the developing world.