This month, Brainstorm is riding on the coat tails of another organisation's CIO Survey. In November last year, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation (HDS) announced the results of its inaugural Innovation Index, which interviewed 50 CIOs and IT decision-makers from organisations with over 1 000 employees in South Africa. Of these, 15 percent were from public sector organisations. The results showed that almost half - 48 percent of surveyed organisations - are struggling to extract value from information because of their current approaches to IT.
"South African organisations can accelerate business growth and competitive advantage by aligning IT with business strategy," said Wayne Dick, business development manager for Sub-Saharan Africa, Hitachi Data Systems, in the survey release.
These were some of the survey findings:
* Forty-eight percent of South African CIOs agree that current IT processes are restricting organisations' ability to leverage data to drive growth.
* Only 20 percent of CIOs strongly feel they have enough access to business leaders to develop and execute effective IT strategy.
Consolidation
Dick believes one of the challenges on the business side is the governance of all the information generated by the business - making sure it's stored and protected. "For this, IT needs hybrid skills - a good understanding of the business and its challenges, what it wants to achieve, so that it can engage in a collaborative approach, rather than just being regulators there to protect."
He says the way in which information is stored dictates what you can do with it. "Architecture must be flexible enough to respond to business requirements. We believe architecture must be consolidated. IT investments are often driven by a particular project off to one side of the datacentre.
However, companies should be looking at information across the company's lifecycle to make sure the architecture will support it through its different life stages - from production to static to being stored off-site, when the ability to access the storage repository is lost. If it remains in the architecture, it can be easily presented to business.
"By realigning the relationship between business management and IT, and tapping into the vast troves of company intelligence, organisations can quickly accelerate beyond their nearest competitors. Organisations that view IT holistically can enable greater productivity, drive new revenue opportunities and unleash growth potential," he concluded in the survey report.
48% of South African CIOs agree that current IT processes are restricting organisations' ability to leverage data to drive growth.
Robert Boccia, CIO of Lion of Africa Insurance, recently completed the implementation of a significant project to deliver business intelligence within his organisation. The project has delivered dashboard functionality that allows the business to view information in detail to support higherlevel business decision-making.
Measure maturity
"Data was being collected, but wasn't being looked at in any meaningful way," he says. "We didn't have many analysis tools in place."
He says this implementation has made a considerable difference to the way the business operates. "People are now able to draw insights from information that is surfaced to them.
"They can tell whether a piece of the business is profitable or not. They can assess - from looking at trends - whether an event will change the piece of the business from profitable to not profitable."
The next step, he says, is being able to make predictions. "Real time isn't good enough; insurance wants to be able to predict certain things. If we know there's going to be a hail shower and can predict the claims that will arise from that, we can take corrective action by proactively reserving chunks of funds and creating extra capacity to service those claims."
He believes one of the biggest enablers that allowed Lion of Africa Insurance to get its architecture to the next level was the adoption of a maturity model that measured how advanced its capabilities were, as it moved from basic to rationalised. He says this would help other South African organisations assess the state of its architecture and where they need to take it.
Hilton Goodhead, product director at MeMe Mobile, a premium advertising channel that presents customised marketing messages to mobile subscribers, says his team does extract value from their current IT infrastructure, but even after having made considerable investments in this space, they are still finding new areas for value extraction.
"We believe more intelligence would open up new opportunities for, and a deeper understanding of, our business. Consequently, this is an area in which we are actively investing," he says. For other South African organisations to begin extracting value from their data, he suggests they invest in personnel with strong data analytic skills, sound knowledge of the key metrics on which the business is based and extend to include familiarity with advanced spreadsheet skills like pivot tables, while ideally including a working knowledge of SQL.
He says that in MeMe Mobile's work with South African companies, including those that have the advantage of large quantities of good-quality, machine-generated data (such as mobile operators), his team often notes that management isn't willing to invest time and resources into proper data analysis.
"In several cases, management has unfortunately shown an unwillingness to engage beyond the third page of such reports. We also find that recommendations are seldom implemented even if the value is acknowledged, as 'business as usual' is far easier to execute than something new." He says it takes real commitment, energy and courage to implement something new, and that data analysis is a waste of time unless the organisation is willing to respond to the findings.
We also find that recommendations are seldom implemented even if the value is acknowledged, as 'business as usual' is far easier to execute than something new.
Hilton Goodhead, MeMe Mobile
These three IT decision-makers have shown there's no question that huge advances can be made if organisations focus their IT on understanding data - but that this will only happen if other business leaders believe in and support the projects.
This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.
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