New Role of the CIO in Era of Big Data - Equal Parts Innovator and Gatekeeper

The days of “keeping the lights on” are long gone. With our ability to understand and synthesize new data into critical insights, today’s CIOs are primed to take on a more visible, expanded leadership role by ushering the company through a series of stages that will enable achieve greater data maturity:

Stage 1 - Internal Optimization: Achieve data-driven thinking that turns the standard gut heuristics into concrete insights leading to experiment-driven, continual improvement. Whether your business is generating machine data, consumer data, fleet data, environment data or process and system data, the health of your business is written in the story told by that data.

Stage 2 - Product Optimization: Turning these insights into enhanced or new products for customers is where a bigger impact will occur. Understand how the organization can best leverage this data to optimize customers’ experience.

Stage 3 - New Data Products: The last step is to bring new data product to your customers by directly delivering the insights to them. What does your data tell your customers about themselves and their business?

Within many traditional businesses, Stage 2 has barely been explored, and Stage 3 is a foreign concept. The CIO needs to be the evangelist that leads their organization to these next-level operations.

Of course, with this great opportunity to take a more prominent seat at the executive table come equally great challenges. Governance and controls necessary for this new threat level are a much bigger challenge than many companies fully recognize.

Like so much in security, a single connected device might be rated a small risk, but the sum of many—or millions—of small risks add up to the most serious. A connected enterprise’s machines, employees, customers, fleets and systems provide nearly complete insight into what a company does and how exactly it does it. It is a real-time capture of all of an enterprise’s strengths and weaknesses, one that is extremely attractive to malicious actors, whether competitive interests, nation states or criminal enterprises.

This is just one of the unique balancing acts that CIOs must contend with in this new era. As more devices become connected and access via the cloud gives us 24/7 visibility, we are uniquely positioned to capitalize on the significant value in data but also tasked with the important role of ensuring this new most-valuable asset is effectively guarded. It is a role that requires as many hats as there are terms for the era of Big Data and the Internet of Things.