CEOs unprepared for “big data”
Chief executives are unprepared to effectively manage the quantity and quality of the data their companies are currently experiencing, according to Gartner lead, Peter Sondergaard.
Addressing the media at the Gartner Symposium in Cape Town late Tuesday (28 August), the senior vice-president warned that outside of the utility sector, “CEOs are not prepared for what is going on right now,” from a big data point of view. He said that company heads faced a large corporate governance challenge in regulating data appropriately.
Gartner believes that large companies will experience public failures in how they treat data at an enterprise level in the coming years.
He said that IT departments could play a big role in working with CEOs to manage the process.
Speaking at the opening session of the conference earlier in the day, Sondergaard told delegates: “Information is the oil of 21st century, big data will change the way everything works.”
However, the research VP stressed that big data would be a creator of jobs. By 2015, he said, big data demand would enable the creation of one million jobs in Global 1000 companies, alone. However, he cautioned that only a third of those positions would be filled.
Guest speaker at the conference, Dr Jasper Horrell, general manager of science computing and innovation for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) South Africa, underlined one such area where big data management would be a challenge.
He said that due to the vast amounts of raw data received by each telescope, that information would only be stored for a short time. Initially, the SKA project in the Karoo would have the ability to archive 10 petabytes of data.
“Big data is a concern for SKA,” Horrell said, adding that the iconic project would require leading skills in science and technology.
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