Fetch Technologies Blog
Extracting Value from Chaos

IDC’s 2011 Digital Universe Study titled “Extracting Value from Chaos” quantifies the amounts of data being generated today: “In 2011, the amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.8 zettabytes (1.8 trillion gigabytes) – growing by a factor of 9 in just five years.“  And, according to IDC, “enterprises have some liability for 80% of information in the digital universe at some point in its digital life.”

While this might seem like a daunting challenge for IT executives, it really is a great opportunity to elevate the role of IT from being an internal service provider to being a driver of business transformation and business growth. This means that the IT executive’s job is to not just provide the infrastructure and tools to gather, manage and process this data, but to partner with business unit managers to educate them on the availability of all these new sources of data and the analytics available to extract business-relevant insight.

This insight might range from a deeper operational understanding of cost drivers (by giving fine-grained metrics on supply chain or workflow costs), to a deeper understanding of pricing (for example, by providing near-real-time pricing information from the web) to better understanding consumer sentiment on the web and uncovering new business opportunities.

As the IDC report notes, “Taking a lead in big data efforts provides the CIO with an opportunity to be the most significant strategic partner for a business unit or even drive a transformation of the entire enterprise.”

Managing this explosion of available data is difficult enough for IT executives, so elevating the discussion of “big data” from the “how” to the “why” will help focus these efforts on the areas of transformative business value from the get-go – and will hopefully unleash creative insights that will drive significant growth and make your company more productive, and just maybe will transform a whole industry!