Johannesburg, 30 Jan 2015
The past three decades in the ICT industry have seen many disruptive waves of technology, but never as many waves hitting simultaneously as we are seeing today.
That's the view of Servaas Venter, Country Manager of EMC Southern Africa: "CIOs in today's hyper-competitive global environment will have to catch the wave that makes the biggest impact on enabling the business and accelerating revenue and business growth."
As the digital economy pushes enterprises to analyse and solve problems faster, businesses are asking CIOs and IT professionals to help reduce complexities, improve synergies across organisations, and leverage existing information, regardless of where it resides.
"For instance, the EMC team is extending its data lake architecture capabilities to enable multiple organisations to make data-driven decisions and accelerate the value for the businesslike never before," Venter says.
To do this, CIOs and IT professionals must:
* Start at 'home' by automating and digitising critical IT processes and services. This is essential for IT as a service to be successful.
* Partner even closer with the business units to truly understand their requirements and how to help them.
* Take advantage of the analytical and data science knowledge and activities that have been surfacing throughout the company, so they can leverage existing best practices and prioritise projects rather than reinvent the wheel.
* Explore how to build capabilities and flexibility into a data lake solution to allow users to incorporate more publicly available data into their analyses.
* Capture and share all the incredible data science knowledge in the company to train and help their users to go beyond analysis paralysis and get the most out of the wealth of data.
* Build data-driven apps that simplify the experience for users and allow them to have the information they need at their fingertips.
"CIOs are now strategists and business enablers," Venter says. "In 2015 and beyond, we must strive to help our companies differentiate their products and services; reduce development and sales cycles; and optimise business processes and performance. Digitisation and big data analytics are crucial."
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