A recent study of global CIOs by IBM shows that what keeps CIOs up at night isn't necessarily just  short term IT cost pressure. The study indicates that  intelligence & analytics (cited by 83% of respondents) and virtualization (cited by 76% of respondents) are top of mind.

This makes sense and suggests  that CIOs are thinking ahead in terms of how IT can help position their companies for success in the new normal.

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The idea of amassing huge amounts information is an attractive theme for many organizations.  But what’s often overlooked is how all that data, while a potentially powerful asset, can also become a big liability. Collecting information carries with it both a moral and a monetary responsibility since data needs to be cleansed of private information not needed for analyses, as well as safeguarded, and eventually disposed of properly. But what I would call “healthy” data practices are lacking at many companies.  That arises from a disconnect between the incentives and risks of data harvesting. While the benefits of data mining can be quantified and realized in the short term, the risks take longer to appear and are harder to measure.

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In many organizations, data quality often is seen as a  technical subject, something  of lesser importance that business units can’t do much about.  Problems predictably are passed on to IT,  which may do some data cleansing, or perform some technical fixes to make the data work one way or another. The business, of course, has an easy  party to blame if data quality targets aren’t met or something goes really wrong. Maybe that’s  a bit of an exaggeration, but we have seen situations like this on more than one occasion.  This make-do approach is disappointing when you consider how data has become a key enabler of  business performance and excellence in operations.

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Analytics is about capturing, structuring, and providing a multi-dimensional view of data to better extract insights. It's an important subject, and to say that is perhaps  obvious.  There are plenty of case studies where companies have used data to create  competitive advantage, as well as a number of best-selling books along the same lines.  But what has really struck  me over the past  couple of weeks is the significant moves in this area by the big players. 

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Given the recent news about the swine flu, we should expect to see some activity on Google’s Flu Trends site.  From the website: "Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems."  But, the broader question is really, what can businesses take away from this?

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