The Path to Creating an Insight-Driven Business

With big data comes big responsibilities.

A majority of IT leaders believes that big data capabilities will influence whether their organizations will remain relevant and competitive in the future. Yet most of the surveyed tech leaders said IT development processes are creating barriers to arriving at crucial insights when needed, according to a recent survey from Capgemini and EMC.

In fact, global C-suite level execs and senior decision-makers said their organizations will risk becoming irrelevant or uncompetitive if they do not embrace big data.

“We have reached an inflection point in the market,” said John Brahim, head of global practice for Capgemini Insights and Data. “Information is at the heart of every business decision, and companies need to fully embrace the opportunities of big data or risk losing out in the marketplace.”

The report, “Big and Fast Data: The Rise of Insight-Driven Business,” reveals that investment in big data initiatives is expected to increase over the next three years. But a shortage of analytics specialists and overall IT systems performance issues are keeping senior IT and business executives from arriving at critical decisions within an acceptable time frame. Such shortcomings must be addressed for companies to transform data into a key, strategic asset.

“While some organizations are using big data to reduce cost and improve existing performance, others are using it to drive into new markets and ultimately to monetize data in its own right,” Brahim said. “Every enterprise must now define a path to become an insight-driven business.”

Big data confounds some organizations–and rightfully so. It seems there is plenty of talk about unstructured data and how it can transform a business. But seeing results from a big-data project isn’t as clear as some suggest.

Before CIOs can turn data into actionable results, they must be sure their data centers can handle these new workloads that accompany unstructured data. Addressing data center shortcomings and legacy technology that doesn’t lend itself to processing various streams of information should be a CIO’s first priority.

Patrick K. Burke is senior editor of CIO Insight.