| | SEPTEMBER 201619CIOReviewIT: Helping Clients to Reach their PotentialBy Stuart Kippelman, SVP & CIO, Platform Specialty Products Corporation [NYSE: PAH]Revolutionizing the IT Industry with Big DataWe are all aware that everything we do in IT is for the purpose of delivering valuable data to the business users at our companies, at the right place, and at the right time. It is not about which hardware or software product we use, which standard was selected, or which vendor provides it to us. It is not about the technology, or how energy efficient the data center is (unless you are one of the few specific technology companies). What Big Data is all about, is what business improvement can be achieved when we properly apply compute power to answer questions. Making quick and accurate business decisions is one of the best ways to create a competitive advantage. Yet, we are only just beginning to leverage big data to help speed the decision making process. We have done a good job of collecting, organizing, and storing data. We have spent considerable time working to maintain, manage and improve the accuracy, quality and completeness. This is all good, but we must shift as an industry to make the data more easily consumable by the end users in our company. We need better tools which make self-service analytics as mainstream as access to email or the Internet. Until we can do that, big data remains available only to the experts.Last, not only can we make faster decisions, on a much larger set of data, but we can mine the data to find hidden meaning that no human could have found in a reasonable time. Earlier in my career I developed software that turned documents into patterns, a kind of fingerprint. Then matching up the patterns, you were able to determine which documents spoke about the same topic, but used totally different wording to do it. With this method, we were able to group documents and find a very different meaning in them vs. what we thought was there. It helped many scientists in searching for research. We all must think different about the application of big data, and how it can impact growth.Leveraging the Technology of Tomorrow I believe the smartwatch can become a significant productivity tool in the workplace. The productivity improvement is dramatic when you think about it. It is so much more convenient than removing Stuart KippelmanCIO INSIGHTS
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