As the data deluge continues, IT and business leaders must be able to collect, govern, manage and secure the data across their IT estate. But that’s not as straightforward as it sounds.

CIOs today are getting mixed messages. On one hand, they are hearing that the new age is about data-centricity so they must ensure they better collect, govern, manage and secure the data across their IT estate. On the other hand, it’s about what business insights that data can provide. These data insights ultimately differentiate the industry laggards from the market leaders. As IDC says, data-centric organisations are able to become ‘digital achievers’ and drive improved business performance.

At the same time, many a CIO will attest that this futuristic vision is some way off. Many simply don’t know where data is, who’s using it or how it’s being used – especially in geographically dispersed organisations with a plethora of different business units, users, devices and core business systems. In short, they simply don’t have visibility of what their data estate looks like.

This state of affairs is going to get worse before it gets better –- with IDC forecasting that enterprise data will increase to 175bn zettabytes by 2022, much of it in unstructured files. Not only does storing vast amounts of unused data put your organisation, customers and partners at risk, it’s also increasingly costly to store – one study suggests that data overload may have cost organisations up to $3.3 trillion.

Clive Humby, a British mathematician who helped create British retailer Tesco’s Clubcard loyalty programme, once coined the, now clichéd, phrase ‘data is the new oil’ – but he did so with a very clear caveat:

Data is the new oil. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc., to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analysed for it to have value.

Clive Humby

In this episode, we tackle the reality faced by CIOs on their data journeys, including topline thoughts on:

• What their data estate looks like in 2019/2020: their successes and key challenges.
• How they are approaching data management, compliance, governance and security.
• Changing business objectives, the impact on CIOs and their IT teams, and what that means for their data strategies.
• Ultimately, what practical steps they are taking to become more data-centric – and how they overcome barriers to doing so.