Why Intelligence Is The New Oil For The Future Enterprise

Much has been said about data being the new oil that will fuel businesses in the future. But the reality is that it’s not about the amount of data that organizations have access to, but how effective their decisions are based on that data. Therefore, data alone will not be the new oil, rather intelligence will fuel the digital economy, and organizations that can create intelligent business processes to deliver contextualized and consent-based experiences will win in this new data-driven world.

As intelligence (and technology in general) increasingly underpins future business models, there is a big question around the role of IT moving forward. The CIO needs to be part of boardroom discussions driving decision-making around the broader business (and digital) strategy. This raises yet another debate about the role of the CIO in this context.

IDC believes that in the emerging set of “tech stakeholders” highlighted in the digital dream team below, the CIO clearly has an important role to play: as an orchestrator of budgets, technologies, and the teams (business and IT) to deliver on the organization’s digital vision.

IDC’s research shows that 92% of CIOs are aiming to be either “strategic” or “disruptive” in their organizations over the next three to five years in order to deliver an enterprise-wide digital transformation agenda. The biggest challenge on this journey is the fact that the amount of information stored within an enterprise is growing at approximately 40% every year, and external data pipelines are growing exponentially. In this context, it is no surprise that the transformation of information into actionable intelligence will be the difference between winning and losing in the digital era. Therefore, CIOs need to move away from an obsession with technology to an obsession with the intelligent business processes that link to the digital dream team. But the language needs to change. For example:

Let’s take, for example, the design-to-operate intelligent process highlighted below. In the digital era, there is a requirement for a centralized data management platform to create a single version of truth integrating data from all the systems, business applications, and digital apps underpinning this business process. This, in turn, is fed by data pipelines from external sources that need to be incorporated in real time across the process, driving specific actions, either automated or guided by intelligent technologies (typically AI/ML-based). Finally, that single version of the truth needs to be fleshed out via an end-to-end analytics layer providing real-time, end-to-end visibility to the various members of the digital dream team.