Why gaining agility through data starts with people

Almost any business will tell you, with very good reason, that its most important asset is its people. A services provider without people is just an empty office, a manufacturer just idle heavy machinery, and a health system just a collection of empty beds.

This truth is not going to change, but in recent years the picture of an organization’s value beyond its people has been fundamentally transforming. Where different sectors might once have given very different accounts of where their value lies, today the second greatest asset is becoming, in the majority of areas, data.

More digitalized tools, infrastructure, and processes which are more highly connected have delivered an explosion of data which offers deeper insights into customers, more efficient operations, higher quality innovation, faster decision-making, and more besides. Data, in short, is promised to enable all the agility and responsiveness that businesses need to drive growth.

The promise of artificial intelligence

Of course, as any CTO or CIO tasked with leveraging data into a competitive advantage knows, raw data itself is only a promised, hypothetical benefit. The exponential growth in data does not arrive in an easily-usable form, precisely because it is coming from everywhere. Sources like connected devices and physical sensors, financial transactions and website user journeys, social media chatter and market trends all collectively emit a vast, chaotic stream of information for businesses to manage.

That chaos leaves technology leaders juggling two significant pressures. First is the spiraling cost of storage. Knowing that value may be embedded in all of this data incentivizes keeping as much of it as possible around, which – especially with heavier formats like video and audio – can lead to storage bills running into the millions per year.

The growing weight of IT costs itself exacerbates the second major pressure: rising expectations around finding value in the noise of business data. In…