Data is growing exponentially, at a compound annual growth rate of 57%, according to IDC. If not harnessed, this will result in wasted opportunities and ill informed decisions, says Himanshu Desai, director of marketing and information management, IBM Software Group.
“For information to become a strategic asset to the enterprise, structured and unstructured data needs to be mined and analysed to create a new kind of intelligence,” he explains. By doing so, says Desai, organisations will be able to optimise business processes, decisions and actions, and create and sustain a competitive business advantage.
“To optimise business performance, organisations need to gain insight from the large amounts of information available.” He says this can be achieved by collecting and integrating the data from multiple sources, and analysing and managing this new information with information management approaches and tools.
Desai also advises organisations to move from a reaction to a prediction approach, by no longer responding to events after the fact, but forecasting them and proactively handling situations before they happen.
Information transformation
partners and customers, sharing appropriate information between all of them.
“In doing so, organisations will be able to transform their business through the use of information.” This 'information-led transformation', argues Desai, will empower organisations to become smarter and develop entirely new capabilities for optimising business processes and decisions.
Desai explains that having information and business analytics available to the right people in the right place, in the right context and right time, is the only way forward in this era of information explosion.
“We live in a time where data is literally exploding, with more than 200 billion e-mails sent every day across the globe,” he points out. With new data available at a rate of 15 petabytes daily, businesses face twin challenges, he adds.
“Not only must organisations cope with phenomenal amounts of available information, but they must harness this data for better business decision-making too,” he concludes.
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