Is your CIO making the most of your data?

Denis Bensch, CIO, FlowCentric Technologies

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The Y2K debacle damaged the confidence that businesses had in IT, and it took several years to build back that trust. After the panic caused by the Y2K glitch, getting buy-in from executives at both financial and operational levels became more difficult. As a result, CIOs had to evaluate how they could deliver tangible value to business and win back executive trust.

 Thank goodness for progress

While businesses may have been nervous to commit to technology, many of their employees were hungry for new developments. The widespread availability of good quality 3G coverage by the mid-2000s changed the way that people shared information forever, and arguably prompted the rapid evolution of the smartphone. Smartphones and cloud services encouraged people to depend on technology and become less fearful of using it in their daily lives.

As enthusiasm for a connected world grew, so did the amount of information that was produced by employees, customers and suppliers, as well as the demand for more secure and better managed systems. And where there is information, there is opportunity for CIOs to deliver strategic value.

Without action, data is meaningless

Reliable information has been recognised and traded as a commodity for as long as humans have been able to communicate, because information really can equate to power.

Modern businesses no longer suffer from information scarcity, but rather from an overload of data. As a result, organisations have become increasingly reliant on their CIOs to help them not only make sense of it all, but to extract value from the data.

“Data without action is meaningless,” states Denis Bensch, CIO of FlowCentric Technologies. “Putting systems and protocols in place that are designed to capture, manage and protect data – that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.”

Today’s technology platforms cannot be treated as if they are just new versions of legacy systems. If a CIO chooses the company’s systems wisely, the technology will allow them to design a completely new digital enterprise, one that is able to exploit the influx of information by adding action to otherwise stagnant bytes of data.

FlowCentric Processware is one of the key systems a CIO can use to deliver value to business.

“The business management software delivers a platform that CIOs can use to build tailored solutions capable of analysing corporate data, detecting anomalies and automatically beginning a procedure designed to rectify the irregularity,” explains Bensch.

As a technologist, it may be tempting to jump on every shiny new piece of tech and try to make it fit your business, but that will do little more than waste money and undermine the trust your fellow executives have placed in you.

When considering changes, it is important that the CIO deeply consider whether the technology will support or further enable the strategic vision of the company, or simply add to the data clutter.

To find out more about the FlowCentric Processware business process management software or the best-of-breed solutions that the company has built, please visit flowcentric.com.