“Banks have begun dusting off some of the ambitious data management projects they began in the early 2000s, then shelved when the financial crisis and recession hit. But according to SAP’s top banking executives, who met with us last week, these projects are being scaled down to handle a single problem, such as improving same-day liquidity risk reporting, rather than trying to transform data systems across the entire company at once. The Walldorf, Germany-based software company’s executives shared what they’re seeing and hearing from their U.S. bank customers about the challenges of managing large data silos (sometimes referred to by the overused yet ill-defined term Big Data). The Big Data myth. This is not a bank-specific issue, but the basic premise of the hyped-up term Big Data is the idea that companies’ (and social media networks’) data sets have grown so large and complex that they are awkward to work with using standard database management tools. But often it makes sense to narrow the data set first.”