This weekend, I complete 3 years of TCS second innings. Most of the three years I have been working with large insurance providers trying to figure out the ways to add value with the technology to their operations and strategy.
The concurrent period has been a period of re-imagination. Companies and individuals (consumers / employees) slowly moving towards reimagining themselves in the wake of converging digital forces like cloud computing, analytics & big data, social networking and mobile computing.
Focus of my career in Information Technology has always been “Information” and not technology. I am a firm believer in “Information” led transformation rather than “technology” led transformation. The basis for information is data and the ability to process and interpret the data, making it applicable and relevant for the operational or strategic issues being addressed by the corporate business leaders.
Technologists are busy making claims that their own technology is best suited for the current data processing needs. Storage vendors are finding business in providing the storage in cloud. Mobility providers are betting big on wearable devices making computing more and more pervasive. The big industrial manufacturers are busy fusing sensors everywhere and connecting them on the internet following the trend set by the human social networking sites. A new breed of scientists calling themselves data scientists are inventing algorithms to quickly derive insights from the data that is being collected. Each one of them is pushing themselves to the front taking support of the others to market themselves.
In the rush, there is a distinctive trend in the business houses. The CTO projecting technology as a business growth driver and taking a dominant role is common. The data flows should be plumbed across the IT landscape across various technologies causing a lot of hurried and fast changing plumbing issues.
In my view the data flow should be natural just like streams of water. Information should be flowing naturally in the landscape and technology should be used to make the flow gentle avoiding the floods and tsunamis. Creating data pools in the cloud storage and connecting the pools to form a knowledge ecosystem grow the right insights relevant to the business context remains the big challenge today.
The information architecture in the big data and analytics arena is just like dealing with big rivers and having right reservoirs and connecting them to get best benefit in the landscape. And a CIO is still needed and responsible for this in the corporate.
If data becomes an ocean and insights become an effort like “Finding Nemo” the overall objective may be lost. Cautiously avoiding the data ocean let us keep the (big) data in its pools and lakes as usable information while reimagining data in the current world of re-imagination. This applies to both corporate business houses as well as individuals.
Hoping Innovative reimagination in the digital world helps improve the life in the ecosystems of the real world….
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