Business decision-makers have always relied on data — in whatever form it came — to help them make the right decisions at the right times. In the past, however, data had to be manually collected by such methods as talking with individuals face to face or through phone or mail surveys. For this and other reasons, most business leaders had access to a limited amount of useful data.
Data collection is much easier now, or at least it yields a fuller crop. The problem today is not one of quantity, for companies now have access to mountains of data. The challenge, rather, is around use and understanding. Many companies today may have access to reams of data but lack the ability to separate the useful from the non-useful — to derive those kernels of knowledge from data that feed into the making of game-changing business decisions.
Businesses may be at different stages of unlocking the power of data, but they share a common conviction that it can make or break an enterprise.
When 30 of Canada’s leading CIOs connected at the 2018 annual CanadianCIO Summit, one of the key concerns was deriving the full value from disparate sources of data. The leaders spoke confidently as they described data as the new oil, or currency, of the business landscape, but admitted they may be falling short when it came to actually mining, manipulating, and ultimately leveraging their data.
With the support of Cogeco Peer 1, ITWC pulled together a team of experts from the transportation, financial services, housing, and mining sectors to drill deeply into the data challenges and questions currently being faced by top CIOs across Canada.
“Meeting The Data Challenge: Insights from IT Leaders in Four Sectors” explores such key questions around data as:
- How can you use data to advance your organization’s corporate strategy? Does data inform strategy or does strategy inform data?
- How to move from unstructured data to structured data? If structuring data is as much an art as a science, how can we understand that art?
- How do businesses identify their “data” crown jewels of data and separate them from information that might not need sorting?
- How do we build effective data governance structures and processes?
- How do changing privacy and security expectations alter the way people harvest, save and use data?
“Meeting the Data Challenge” offers solutions to many data dilemmas in six easy-to-digest sections. Download the publication now.