Servaas Venter is acting country manager of EMC Southern Africa. The local EMC Forum 2012 is taking place on 9 October, at Gallagher Estate, in Midrand.

Today’s data is the basis for decisions about tomorrow. Yet in many cases, data brings little or no value to the business, remaining unused in the decision-making process.

There’s clearly no lack of data, but rather a lack of insight into the data that companies have.
Organisations are at the point of a data deluge, with loads of data coming from different directions and landing in the corporate environment. Big data analysis is required to try to find the needle in the haystack and distil value from chaos.

The good news about the world’s exponential data growth (more than 1.8 zettabytes of data were created in 2011), is that companies are now able to make decisions based on real-time data analysis, while at the same time keeping these decisions in line with the long-term strategy.

But it’s not only about technology. Data management should be a management philosophy. Companies need to make data analysis part of the corporate culture and data analysis needs to reflect that corporate culture.

Big data is high on most CIOs’ agendas these days. It is one area where CIOs can prove that they are making money by extracting value from the apparent chaos of data in the data centre. No matter their size, organisations cannot do without data – it is the basic building block of information.

But data by itself has little or no value. This is where the role of the CIO can really make a difference. It is through their diligence and direction that an organisation obtains the information it needs to manage corporate performance. Once collected and verified, it is then portrayed in the most insightful way, to the right people and at the right time.