Data defined digital transformation
The traditional task of CIOs being responsible for the technology strategy and procurement within an enterprise is no longer straightforward. The CIO and their team have the unenviable task of tracking the latest innovations and ensuring that businesses embrace these in a risk-free way that simultaneously keeps them ahead of the competition. And, this just got harder.
Cloud technology, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are disrupting the business landscape. These technologies rely on access to quality data and consequently the CIO must first understand and redefine a company’s data strategy before confidently embracing the full potential of cloud, IoT, AI and ML.
What’s more, it is not only about having data, this data must be of good quality and be controllable and consistent to ensure that it can be relied upon to feed these technologies appropriately, to generate business value and inform decisions.
While the CIO’s goals of driving innovation and improving operational efficiency are not complementary, for once digital transformation promises both. AI, for example, can allow businesses to generate information automatically that previously would have required months of research and analysis. It is innovative, efficient and can reveal previously untapped business value.
Gartner predicts that connected devices will hit 14.2 billion in 2019 and grow to 25 billion by 2021, largely driven by previously human-run processes being automated and actioned by devices and algorithms. For areas such as data ownership, algorithmic bias, privacy and regulatory compliance, it suggests that the data powered technology driving the insight will not be easily understood by those actually affected by it.
If these predictions come to fruition, having a handle over the data which fuels this technology is even more important. But, as the business world moves to a more decentralised technology model and ‘shadow IT’ runs rife, CIOs are no longer completely in control of technology within the business; the data it creates; or the security processes around it. Gartner predicts that 50 per cent of the data generated will soon be outside the corporate datacentre, generated by IoT applications and edge computing devices. As a result, CIOs must modernise their data strategy, ensuring it can seamlessly and reliably feed data insights from across the whole business into a technology strategy that will deliver digital transformation.
Organisations need to treat data as a corporate asset that can be used for better and faster decision-making. This requires users to truly trust the data at their disposal with the proper data governance principles in place. Data governance breaks down data silos from disparate systems across the enterprise, and establishes a set of processes, standards and polices that the organisation can agree on to make the data consumable enterprise-wide.
