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Preparing for the Future: How the CIO and CMO Must Collaborate to Win
by Paul Barsch
Moore’s Law, conceptualized by Intel pioneer Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors per microprocessor will double every two years. This exponential increase in processing speeds for various machines/devices will eventually enable advances in economics, biology, technology, business, and other key fields.
The second powerful exponential trend is the increasing amount of data that companies must contend with on a daily basis. According to a Forrester Research report titled “Data, Data Everywhere,” the “volume of the world’s data doubles approximately every three years”!
Companies around the world are literally drowning in data. A typical airline or retailer, for example, is collecting data from myriad operational systems and storing terabytes, if not petabytes, of data.
And for most companies data isn’t conveniently stored in one central location—it is often found on spreadsheets, data marts, and storage devices strewn across the enterprise. In fact, in many organizations, marketers are a key culprit in the creation and upkeep of separate “pocket databases” containing customer lists and purchase histories.
And while capturing and storing relevant data is a challenge, an additional obstacle is analyzing and translating this data into actionable information to improve the customer experience or drive operational efficiencies.
Adding insult to injury, the exponential growth of both data volumes and information technology continues unabated, making it difficult for most enterprises to stay ahead of these S-curves.
Exponential growth is often hard to grasp. Look at the technical innovation that occurred in just the past five years: the boom of social-networking platforms, mobile device proliferation, and deployment of advanced algorithms to solve extremely complex challenges. What innovations will the next five years hold—the next 20?
Instead of fearing these exponential trends, however, the smart executive realizes that advances in data growth can and should be harnessed by the technologies of today and tomorrow. It’s almost a marriage made in heaven.
continues at Marketing Profs