Cape Town, 29 Aug 2012
Companies run the risk of failing if they use all the information they gather about their customers in a way that violates privacy.
Speaking at the Gartner Symposium, in Cape Town, Andy Kyte, VP and Gartner fellow, said in the big data era, companies can learn things about customers that they do not even know about themselves. Business can get amazing insights through big data, he noted.
Information is one of the forces that are converging to form what Gartner calls the nexus, the theme behind this year's symposium. The others are mobile, cloud and social networking.
Data can be used as a predictor, such as to uncover trends such as job losses, said Kyte. Retailers can understand what major life changes people are going through by what coupons consumers have stored on their mobile phones.
However, there are serious risks and responsibilities in this environment. Sharing or selling customer data is tempting, but big companies will fail if their use of the data harms consumers, he commented.
Kyte said it is easy to get a picture of customers through big data that violates their privacy.
Senior VP of research Peter Sondergaard added that there will be some significant failures of companies around how they treat data in the enterprise space.
Arvind Krishna, GM for information management in IBM's software group, has said: “Navigating big data to uncover the right information is a key challenge for all industries.
“Winners in the era of big data will be those who unlock their information assets to drive innovation, make real-time decisions, and gain actionable insights to be more competitive.”
* Nicola Mawson is hosted at the symposium courtesy of Gartner.
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