Mary Poppins arrived on a fortuitous wind and brought order to the Banks’ household in creative and exciting ways. She encouraged Jane and Michael to engage their imaginations to visualise the impossible, then focus their energy on manifesting it. Her unobtrusive travelling bag contained numerous wonders that transcended its size and stretched the realms of possibility. She made the miraculous an everyday occurrence, animated the mundane and blew the competition away!
But how does that help you? Let’s start at the very beginning.
Who is the CIO?
The Chief Information Officer (CIO) manages the IT infrastructure and data environment in an organisation. They may be called the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or IT Director or these may be additional roles in a larger organisation. More companies are selecting their CIOs on business acumen rather than technological expertise in order to improve the strategic support of business goals. However, a classical CTO tends to have a very strong technical background, perhaps as a developer or network engineer. Hence the need, in some organisations, for two separate positions.
Their role is to ensure that IT capabilities sustain current operations and enable growth through the effective use of technology and all within budget. Increasingly, this means utilising big data – the large volumes of structured and unstructured data that flood your business every day – to derive value for innovation and decision-making; and utilising AI technology, which benefits from Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to improve functionality with each iteration. They also need to identify and mitigate potential risks. The sheer quantity of data can make these tasks overwhelming.
The CIO dilemma
It’s virtually impossible to plan for every scenario. Who saw Covid 19 coming a year ago? Even if you could imagine all of the variables, there are practical constraints like budget, skills, legacy technology and time to consider. Once all of this is factored in, workable solutions are limited to more immediate demands. During this pandemic, that might be ensuring work from home viability, off-site security and an increased online capacity for sales and supply chain monitoring.
Meanwhile, you are still expected to move forward with your IT Strategic Plan (ITSP). Though that probably also needs an overhaul now. The timeline for certain elements might need to be escalated rapidly and others may be put on the back burner. It’s important to prioritise those aspects that drive your company forward. So what might those be?
What the current crisis has shown us is that those companies with enhanced digital capabilities will fare better. Stay at home orders mean that online activity is higher than ever – but so are levels of frustration. If your processes aren’t user friendly or can’t cope with the increased traffic, consumers will simply click elsewhere. Whilst they seem to have all of the time in the world, they definitely don’t have the patience.
So what’s a realistic mandate?
To promote growth and designated business outcomes, it’s important to make use of all the tools available to you. It is important to consider the following capabilities to achieve your mandate:
- Flexible Data Capture
- Cloud Big-Data Storage
- Streaming Analytics
- Graph Database technology
- Complex Event Processing
- Middleware and ETL base
- AI and Machine Learning frameworks
- Geospatial Processing and Analytics.
These allow you to deploy effective solutions such as: High Volume Transaction Monitoring; Fraud Detection, KYC, AML; Customer360° / Business360° / Customer Data Platform; Recommender Engines; Churn prediction; Risk Early Warning; Geospatial Analysis and Event Processing for IoT devices.
So, if these aren’t part of your ITSP, it’s time to factor them in and fast.
Now, if it’s that simple, what’s the issue? Typically, the CIO dilemma revolves around:
- Budget – If we build this ourselves, how much will it cost?
- Skills – Do we have the necessary skills? Do we bring in new resources or up-skill existing ones? Is it too complex for us?
- Time frame – How long will it take if these capabilities are built in-house? Is that an effective use of our time?
- Uncertainty – How do we start? What technology do we need? What if it doesn’t work?
- Current technology – What are the limitations of our legacy technology?
Reset your perspective
Companies need agility and scalability to cope with the ever-changing global environment. So, it’s time to outsource capabilities that can be handled by external vendors and those which you don’t have the skills, budget or time to create and maintain. This allows you to focus on your core business and generate quick RoI without any of the headaches.
Resolve your CIO dilemma with a powerful data intelligence platform that is a light touch on your existing architecture and which can provide next-gen capabilities in spite of your existing technology.
Locstat’s Graph Powered AI and Event Processing capabilities are the superglue that rapidly connects big-data technology components, necessary for data intelligence solutions. We unlock the value in your data by illuminating the concealed risks and opportunities in the dark spaces of your digital environment. SaaS solutions like Locstat are quick to implement, affordable, scalable and within your reach.
Like Mary Poppins, we stretch the realms of possibility,
make the miraculous an everyday occurrence
and blow the competition away.
Locstat: practically perfect in every way!