The CIO Report

Bill Abbott and Chris Curran

The Big Data movement has a big challenge. Many companies are knee deep in digital data and are spending a lot of money to collect, store and analyze it. Unfortunately, their investments aren’t always paying off. The reason is that too often companies don’t know exactly why they are exerting such an effort in an attempt to tame this torrent of terabytes.

Over the past few years, many companies have  engaged in data hoarding and sifting. They amass astronomical amounts of information from various sources, unstructured and fragmented, and randomly root around for patterns. It’s as if the companies are waiting for the data to deliver a sign that will guide them in the right direction. The trouble with this approach is that it’s as effective as reading tea leaves.

Big Data vendors claim they have a solution. But, throwing more technology into the mix isn’t the entire answer. Sound familiar? The potential pitfall of Big Data is a lot like the age-old issue of aligning business and technology.

At this point, it’s become a standard practice that you don’t implement technology for technology’s sake. Business decisions must drive the reasons for deploying technology. The same is true for Big Data. The first question that executives need to ask themselves before diving in to Big Data is: “Why?”

The key to turning informational “ore” into insightful gold is posing intelligent questions and formulating hypotheses, then digging for answers to prove or disprove theories. As such, Big Data beckons us back to the scientific method.

We need to ask the right questions about the business before prematurely plunging into the data. Exploratory questions can be as simple as understanding how products or profits or behaviors are distributed across customers.  Armed with this type of insight, it might make sense to investigate and understand whether to enhance relationships with customers, reconfigure supply chains or repair the company’s brand reputation. Companies need to understand, however, that what might arise are simply more questions that will need further inquiry.

One of the primary roles for the CIO in stewarding Big Data initiatives is to teach employees how to think and act like scientists with business degrees. In fact, organizations that are effectively exploiting Big Data are employing “data scientists.”

These talented individuals have the intellectual capacity to see the company and its business opportunities in a different light.They are master story tellers who harness their left and right brains, employing numbers, words and visuals to imagine, investigate and illuminate.

CIOs have the power to provide employees with the technological tools they need as well as the capacity to ask probing questions that might generate answers that could propel the company in a new direction. In addition to offering support to data scientists, it’s important for CIOs to supply structure to the process.  Big Data can enable employees to dream big. However, they need boundaries so they don’t get lost in an abyss of billions of bits.

There’s been a lot of talk that these types of whole brain thinkers are hard to find. While that might be true, sometimes they reside right inside the CIO’s own enterprise. Let’s consider individuals in the marketing department who are working on lead generation, managers who are allocating and pricing online advertising inventory in media companies, or safety experts who are studying critical incidents in capital intensive industries like energy and airlines. CIOs can potentially deploy them to the entire organization’s benefit.

To usher in this brave new world of making big decisions through Big Data, CIOs should balance an analytical approach with a sense of adventure.

Bill Abbott and Chris Curran are principals in PwC’s U.S. Advisory practice.  Bill specializes in “Big Data” and applied analytics. Chris is the Advisory practice’s chief technologist and is focused on technology strategy and innovation.