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IBM - Big Data Driving the Need for Analytics(AllAfrica Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Big data is among the three disruptive forces driving the need for analytics, with the other two being the shift of power to the consumer as well as the pressure to do more, according to International Business Machines (IBM). Speaking at the CIO Executive Breakfast on July 24 held to discuss Big Data and Business Intelligence, Andrew Meme, Software Group product development manager, IBM said that the first driver for analytics is the emergence of big data and the opportunity it presents to harness enormous amounts of information in different varieties and formats. "Today's consumers are in control and their ability to understand, communicate and share information across large social networks has greatly empowered them, creating the need for organizations to better understand and anticipate customer behaviors and needs. Third is the increasing pressure to do more with less" said Meme, adding that while this is not necessary a new phenomenon, expectations are increasing rapidly and going beyond the results that traditional optimization techniques have yielded in the past. The breakfast session was organized by CIO East Africa in conjunction with Trans Business Machines (TBM) out of the recognition that by leveraging the natural fusion of big data and Business Intelligence, successful organizations can better transform unrefined information into new, actionable business insights. Using these insights, organizations can then have the power to embed and automate intelligent decisions into operational systems, driving substantial business outcomes and creating new opportunities for competitive advantage. Meme noted that the volume of information and data being generated globally is exponential, with the amount of digital data sets projected to grow by 44 times through 2020 according to International Data Corporation's (IDC) study titled "The Digital Universe Decade - Are You Ready?" conducted in May 2010. "But with big data analytics, this volume doesn't have to be daunting. It can represent the opportunity for new insights. Also, 80% of this information growth is expected to be in the form of unstructured content - physical and digital text, images, audio and video. Basically, an explosion accelerated by the wide adoption of social media and social business activities," he said. He added that even though all this unstructured data can be harder to access and analyze, new technologies like natural language processing can now enable people and organizations to achieve true, 360-degree business insight. Speaking at the same event, Michael Adwera, a certified expert in IT Service management, said that Big Data when harnessed well has numerous benefits to organisations. "Some of the potential business benefits of harnessing Big Data includekey competitive advantage, new revenue opportunities through innovation; increased profitability which can be result from customer satisfaction; business process improvements; public sector efficiencies such healthcare provision among others as well as increased transparency," said Adwera. He added that Gartner predicts that Big Data will deliver transformational benefits to enterprises within 2 to 5 years, and will by 2015 enable enterprises adopting the technology to outperform competitors by 20% in every available financial metric. CIO Breakfast Series Kampala: Unfogging the Cloud On 19th July 2012, CIO East Africa partnered with National Information Technology Authority Uganda (NITA-U) to serve up another interesting Breakfast Series discussion. The breakfast meeting attracted a host of IT specialists from both the private and public sectors. The theme of the day was Shared Services, Live Cloud & Storage in the Cloud. Speakers included Andrew Karanja, Director, CIO East Africa, James Saaka, Executive Director - NITA, Laksmi Vemuganti, Assistant Vice President Dhanush, Crispus Ombogo, Systems Engineer - Cisco, Brian Nyakeri Client IT Architect & Alexander Kioni, Security Systems & Technical Consultant - IBM, Andre de Meyer, Director Sales, IFS Africa and Nicholle Myles, Business Development Director, CIO East Africa. Deeper analysis on the above topics yielded deeper understanding. The three things that stood out were; first, NITA-U Director, Mr. James Saaka talked about government activities to make IT more relevant. The government is setting up the necessary infrastructure to support the implementation of cloud services. The national backbone is almost complete and live. Call center support, guidelines and standards are being designed to facilitate growth in the sector. One thing Mr. Saaka stressed on was that there is need for the public sector to lead the way by having all the government agencies and bodies linked in one cloud so as to ensure easy service delivery to the people and save resources. The government was committing to integrating the cloud in its daily model and hoping that this would have a trickledown effect to the people who would receive and respond to services faster. Initiatives in the private sector would be kick started and sharing of pertinent information would be easy in its departments. Second, was Andre de Meyer who talked about the need of appropriate service delivery model for the financial sector. He mentioned the sensitivity of the data and operations of key organizations especially those involved in financial services and security at national level. They have a need to share information across the board in real time and yet keep it protected. The need for ensuring that there is no way for data to be accessed, changed, deleted, copied or inserted by unauthorized persons is not 100% in the cloud. This translates into such organizations being forced to have their own internal shared services platform that ensures absolute control over data flows in and out of the organization. In other words, stick to the traditional model of sharing information. Cloud services, like any technology have numerous benefits but they have to be used appropriately. In one case, multiple organizations can join up with the cloud to have their services delivered in a highly efficient manner. But not all organizations are advised to do this. Before you hook up to the cloud, analysis of a company's needs and operations have to be done thoroughly. In case where information transferred is too sensitive, then a private cloud would suffice. This would be an improvement of the traditional client server model into a shared services platform. Appropriate technology deployment is key. The potential of Uganda's BPO industry is one to be desired. According to Laksmi Vemuganti, as compared to Uganda, Rwanda has had a tremendous growth in their IT infrastructure in the last ten years whereas Uganda has just started updating its own. Rwanda's IT infrastructure is years ahead of Uganda's yet the bet is on Uganda as the best BPO hub for the region. The main reason for this is that Uganda has a lot of educated graduates from its numerous universities who are hungry for knowledge, opportunity and are over all at least bilingual; either they understand English and French or English and Arabic which opens up the West African and Middle Eastern markets. Somehow it has come down to Uganda's lambasted education system. The huge number of educated people in Uganda means that companies have to do little training to get the employees up to scratch. And another thing, according to IBM's Mary Nene is that Ugandans and East Africans as whole are very accepting of new technology. They are able to adopt and integrate it quickly without much hassle. Copyright CIO East Africa. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). |