Computerworld - February 13, 2012

it,” says Paul Gustafson, director of Computer Sciences Corp.’s Leading Edge Forum technology programs. “The data was archived, and it was modeled around business processes, not modeled as a broader set of core knowledge for the enterprise.

The mantra is this shift from collecting to connecting.”
IT is standing at the forefront of this data revolution, indus-
try observers say.

“This is an opportunity to walk into the CEO’s office and say, ‘I can change this business and provide knowledge at your fingertips in a matter of seconds for a price I couldn’t touch five years ago,’ ” says Eric Williams, CIO at Catalina Marketing.

Williams should know — Catalina maintains a 2.5-petabyte customer-loy-alty database that includes data on more than 190 million U.S. grocery shoppers collected by the largest retail chains. This information is, in turn, used to generate coupons at checkout based on purchase history.

To steer organizations into the era of real-time predictive intelligence, Williams and other industry watchers say, tech managers must evolve their enterprise information management architecture and culture to support advanced analytics on data stores that measure in terabytes and petabytes (potentially scaling to exabytes and zettabytes).

“IT is always saying they want to find ways to get closer to the business — [big data] is a phenomenal opportunity to do exactly that,” Williams says.

Rather than waiting for the pieces to fall into place, savvy IT leaders should start prepping themselves and their organizations to get ahead of the transformation, say analysts such as Gartner’s Mark Beyer.

Here are the top five actions tech managers should be taking today to lay out a proper foundation for the big-data era of tomorrow.

ing. “There’s a certain push to this coming from people who are commercializing the technology,” Raden observes.

Smart I T managers will resist the urge to try to drink from the fire hose, and will instead serve as a filter in helping to figure out what data is and isn’t relevant to the organization.

A good first step is to take stock of what data is created internally and determine what external data sources, if any, would fill in knowledge gaps and bring added insight to the business, Raden says.

This is an opportunity
to walk into the CEO’s
office and say, ‘I can
change this business.’

Once the data scoping is underway, IT should proceed with highly targeted projects that can be used to showcase results as opposed to opting for big-bang, big-data projects. “You don’t have to spend a few million dollars to start a project and see if it’s worth it,” Raden says.

Let Business Needs Prevail

You may have heard this before, but IT-business alignment is critical to an initiative as huge and varied as big data, IT analysts say. Many of the initial big-data opportunities got started in areas outside of IT; marketing departments, for example, have been tapping into social media streams to gain better insights into customer requirements and buying trends.

While specialists in specific disciplines on the business side may recognize the money-making opportunities, it is IT’s responsibility to take charge of the data-sharing and data-federation concepts that are part and parcel of a big-data strategy.

“This is not something IT can go out
and do on its own,” says Dave Patton,
principal information management
industries analyst at Pricewaterhouse-
Coopers. “It will be hard to turn this
into a story of success if [the initiative] is
Early in Catalina Marketing’s big-data
initiative, Williams brought business
managers together with its financial
planning and analysis (FPA) group in a
team effort to make a business case for
information architecture investments.

The business side identified areas where new insights could deliver value — for example, in determining subsequent purchases based on shopping cart items or through a next-buy analysis based on product offers — and the FPA team ran the numbers to quantify what the results would mean in terms of enhanced productivity or increased sales.

ERIC WILLIamS,
CIO, CATALINA MARKETING

Take Stock of Your Data

Nearly every organization potentially has access to a steady stream of unstructured data — whether it’s pouring in from social media networks or from sensors monitoring a factory floor. But just because an organization is producing this fire hose of information, that doesn’t mean there’s a business imperative to save and act on every byte.

“With this initial surge around big data, people are feeling an artificial need to understand all the data out there coming from Web logs or sensors,” notes Neil Raden, an analyst at Constellation Research.