1st rule of Big Data Club
Decide what knowledge you want to get — Then explore how you can generate information that can support this give you this knowledge, and finally you can begin to exploit the data you have at your disposal to generate this information.
The trick is not to generate lots of data, but to know how to extract information from it. Big Data™ Tools can assist in exploiting the data you have, to generate new more meaningful data, but that doesn't make it information, it's just more data.
Note that I distinguish between knowledge, information, and data.
One of the biggest challenges we had was introducing all kinds of new technology but minimal impact on bottom-line. In fact, it probably caused a great deal of productivity and cultural issues that just slows everything down.
Regarding your point however, I think you might have missed my point by a little bit, so I'll try to clarify.
I'm not advocating for existing tech. I love new technologies, and they're often a better fit than what came before. What I'm advocating for is that instead of spending time and money on investigating new technologies and trying to find problems you could solve with them, you instead spend time on finding and identifying problems that your organization is running into, or developing a vision on where you want your company to be in 5+ years.
I believe that the best and most suitable technology is always already out there, as long as you know what you need to build.
The thing is of course that looking at new technologies is easy, and identifying worthwhile problems to solve is very, very hard. But that shouldn't stop us from considering that way of thinking.