Gartner suggests that CIOs need to to adopt both technology and business innovation in a bid to achieve competitive advantage with big data.
The report suggests the innovations need to look beyond technology deployed to manage big data, while enterprises also need to seek and embrace the new ways of analysing business problems with big data in order to gain maximum value.
Gartner research vice president Hung LeHong said that big data requires an enterprise to embrace innovation on two levels.
"First, the technology itself is innovative. Second, enterprises must be willing to innovate in the way they perform decision support and analytics. This second reason is not a technology challenge, but rather a process and change management challenge," LeHong said.
"Big data technologies bring innovative ways of analysing existing business problems and opportunities.
"New data sources and new analytics can improve the enterprise in ways that have never been used before."
Additionally, the research firm suggests that creative CIO thinking can discover valuable information sources already within the enterprise that are not used until now.
"Perhaps CIOs feel more comfortable starting with internal data sources, because the thinking is that much of it is already being managed by IT," LeHong said.
"However, in many cases, these internal data sources are not controlled by IT at all."
Further, the CIOs and their teams are advised to work with the business to completely understand the available data and with some innovative thinking the data that is already captured can be converted into a rich data.
According to the report, the early adopters that deployed rapid analytical capabilities have modified their processes to gain the maximum benefit from the speed.
The speed in analysis allows enterprises to include the full week’s data — making their optimisations immediately up to date with market activity.
"CIOs must ensure that big data projects that improve analytical speed always include a process redesign effort that aims at getting maximum benefit from that speed," LeHong said.
"Before pursuing big data investments, ensure that the evaluating team has a clear understanding of how faster analytics will lead to an improved business outcome — and build this into the business case."
