Rethinking ‘Big Data’ — and the rift between business and data ops

But what futurists in particular, and all executives in general, should really be doing is working the great mystery of the modern era: how do we create stakeholder value.

Data is the cement that paves the AI value road. “Big Data” is a critical area that runs the risk of being miscategorized as being either irrelevant — a thing of the past or lacking a worth-the-trouble upside. CIOs and digital executives need to ensure that Big Data is getting the attention it deserves.

Rethinking our thoughts on data

When confronting a long-lived substantive problem — for example, why aren’t we getting full value from data — that is not immediately life threatening, I suggest conducting a mental model audit. How are we thinking about this problem?

I asked a group of senior executives to think about how they think about data. I asked whether they would classify themselves as Swallows, with big ideas and soaring ambitions; Hedgehogs, execs who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea; or Moles, focused on short-term projects with specified deliverables.

I was not surprised to learn that very few execs self-identified as Hedgehogs. This is probably because a universally accepted and deployed framework for creating value with data has not emerged. The consensus was that value was most frequently harvested when stretch data ambitions were clearly articulated with linkages to doable-projects with achievable milestones.

Evidently there is value associated with merely inserting data and analytic ambitions into the multiple strategy-making processes at work in any given enterprise. At the Gartner Data and Analytics Summit 2024, VP Analyst Ehtisham Zaidi shared, “Using frequency counts in earnings calls, companies in the global S&P 1200 that talked about data, analytics, and AI being strategic outperformed their peers 80% of the time in the last nine years.”