| | JULY 20168CIOReviewBusiness at the Speed of InsightsBy David A Chapa, Global CTO, EMCWhat if you could streamline the way your company did business? What if you could move into adjacent markets, expand new revenue opportunities, and do it from a data driven perspective? What if you could identify a way to improve your customer's experience? What if you could get these insights well ahead of your competition?I would venture to guess one of the hottest topics of any CIO staff meeting today is analytics. The hope of answering the "what if" questions by using the valuable data IT has been managing all these years and turn it into actionable information to help propel the business. While this may seem like a new topic, analysis of data has been around for years, as I am sure many of you already know. Even when I was a young Unix admin, for example, I had written several scripts to mine data from a variety of flat file data sources. This would then create a newtext file with the newly captured data in a format that could then be fed back into another script which would ultimately massage it into one of the freely available graphic tools to represent the findings in a meaningful and compelling manner. This is what some would call "old school" analytics; some would call it the beginnings of business intelligence. Whatever you called it, it was mining the data and logs to convert it to information for the business. While that script worked for a small number of source files, and was very rudimentary, it would never work in today's environment of multiple terabytes and petabytes of data. However, the need still exists to extract information from our data today, probably more than ever. Therefore tools have been created to help achieve these results at massive scale. Tools such as Hadoop, Spark, Hive, Tableau, noSQL databases, etc. all provide a method and approach for peering into the data to extract information. Just about every CIO I speak to is either exploring or deploying an analytics farm in the datacenter. The problem is, as one of my peers so aptly put, "what questions do I ask of my data?"Today's digital world has changed so exponentially from my young Unix admin days in the 80s, that is can actually be quite daunting to consider where to begin. Today we are keeping more data than ever, a huge selection of new data IN MY OPINION
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