As the information economy continues to evolve, significant tension is growing between two opposing forces. On one hand, it is essential to keep increasing the empowerment of knowledge worker teams across the organization. For companies to run lean and mean, to ensure that they capitalize on any and all opportunities that may emerge in the market, and to rigorously drive down the risks associated with process or compliance failures, they must keep raising the bar when it comes to what users can do individually and collectively from their PCs, tablets and smartphones.
On the other hand, the constant accretion by the enterprise of more and more applications is badly undermining the economic viability of IT. Most IT organizations are supporting such a huge portfolio of applications where they spend 70%-80% of their limited resources just keeping the lights on. This leaves them with little in the way of resources that they can allocate to projects that really move the needle when it comes to the performance of the business.
The bottom line is that IT needs to support fewer applications—even as it increases its enablement of real-time fact-based decision-making.
And that’s where Big Data analytics delivers benefits that are often overlooked. Unlike conventional IT-driven empowerment—which has historically entailed the development of purpose-built applications that deliver information and/or collaboration in very specific ways—Big Data analytics let users quickly find and socialize information in whatever way best suits their purpose at any given time. So in addition to providing the business benefit of that particular enablement, it also relieves IT of the burden of building and supporting another app. And another. And another.
It’s easy to under-value the mitigation of this support burden. After all, IT operations has plenty of tools for automating management of the enterprise environment. And virtualization is driving down TCO for everything from servers to storage.
However, even with all these advances, the burden on IT operations continues to grow at a much faster pace than its budget. Plus, we don’t want to keep pressuring them to do more with less, anyway. What we really want is to actually give them less to do—so we can spend our IT budget where it will do the business much more good.
And with the kind of do-it-yourself information empowerment that Big Data analytics provides, that’s exactly what we can accomplish. Vivisimo lets users to find and share actionable information on an ad hoc, self-service basis. It’s an IT service that pre-empts the need for any number of IT apps. And in the long term, that relieves IT operations of one of its most problematic workloads.
Companies don’t outperform their competitors because IT hits its service level objectives or shave 5% off their storage costs. They outperform their competitors because they make really good decisions—or, perhaps more critically, because they innovate in ways that allow them to be market disrupters instead of disruptees.
Big Data analytics helps achieve both of these objectives. Yes, it enables better decision-making everywhere across the enterprise. But it also helps shift the allocation of IT spend away from the support of an unending parade of purpose-built applications. And that second benefit may be more important than many of us realize.
