“Big data” most often refers to large amounts of observational data from a domain, for example football. Despite the ever increasing amount of data, most measures collected do include noise and missing data points.
“Actionable insights” actually implies several things: Firstly, it requires an understanding of the domain(football here), which can be used as a basis for reasoning about this domain(football). A key assumption in this context is that we must not only have a structure describing the observations we have gathered, but rather we must have a causal structure, so we can anticipate the consequences of actions we have not yet taken. If we have this ability to evaluate the results of our potential interventions in this domain(football), we can chose the rational course of action among all the possible alternatives. As an added complexity, most dynamics uncovered in a domain(football) are probabilistic rather than deterministic in nature.