by Angela Guess
Scot Petersen of SearchCIO.com recently reported, “You know the topic of ‘big data’ management has really made it when The Harvard Business Review puts it on the cover of its latest issue. The informative article by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson is strategic in focus, as you would expect. One point in particular stood out: Of the five challenges outlined by the authors, only one is technology-based. The others — leadership, talent management, decision making and company culture — are all people-based.”
He went on, “This point was in evidence at last week’s SearchCIO.com CIO 360 dinner event in Chicago. The meeting’s topic was business intelligence, analytics and big data, but few of the guests discussed technology challenges. Rather, they focused on the business factors that come to bear in the age of a data-driven economy. ‘It’s not so much about big data,’ one guest said. ‘It’s about big decisions’.”
Petersen added, “Indeed, guest speaker Tom Trainer, former CIO at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, recounted a story from the mid-’90s, when the company realized it had to change its core competency from drug development to ‘information management’ due to the human genome mapping project — a big data assignment if there ever was one. That was the first big decision. But suddenly, that idea spurred many others, like creating radically aggressive goals for productivity, and a new culture in which data could no longer be ‘hoarded’ by scientists but must be shared in order to maximize value.”
