Succeeding in Big Data Transformation - It is a Journey, Not a Destination!

Charting the Big Data Journey
Last week I participated in an Executive Boardroom with other CIOs discussing their challenges formulating, partnering and executing their Big Data and next-generation analytic strategies. There were some common themes challenging the CIOs - so if you're a CIO then you're not alone. Big Data can be transformational if you focus on the right questions, develop the talent, adopt practices that are still evolving, and deliver value through selective application of new technologies. It's not an easy path - effectively like driving a car while you're still building it, learning how to operate it efficiently, and contemplating what parts of the engine to upgrade.

One area we debated was whether to define an end state. I took a position on this question and reminded CIOs that getting value from Big Data is a journey and not a destination. It requires similar practices as  innovation and ideation, specifically, an agile approach to identifying the questions of greatest value, data science experimentation to find answers, and retrospective analysis to decide the next step in the journey.

I caught some nods from participants, others who prefer getting the governance defined, and others who would rather see well defined business goals. You decide.

Other Big Data Discussions


  • What's Driving Big Data - Many CIOs are helping Marketing and other business partners develop a 360 customer view. Some are working with Operations and hope that they can better forecast issues and opportunities in their supply chains. Still others are still "trying to get the governance right" and are starting to formally define the business owners and data stewards for their existing data repositories.

  • Demystifying Governance - CIOs have the challenge to address governance issues, but without making these efforts as complete prerequisites to moving the business forward. CIOs recognize that they have to train business leader on new terminology (data steward), technologies (data visualization, data quality), and practices (change management, master data) while still demonstrating business value.

  • Pragmatic Challenges - CIOs debated whether investing in one size fits all dashboards was a better approach versus supporting too many customized reports. Even better, many are trying to determine how to move from historical reporting to more predictive applications. Some are still trying to determine, "What to do with all the data" and "How do we find the nuggets".

All good questions.... It's a journey. Special thanks to Evanta for hosting a great event.

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My Simple Recipe for Technology Leadership Success

This is my 200th post!

I reserved this post to highlight why I named the blog Social, Agile, and Transformation. I renamed it a few years ago when I was thinking about my career and accomplishments in startups as a CTO and now as a CIO for the last seven years. At the time, I was also reflecting on something a key adviser said to me, "Isaac, you're not a CIO". I'm not? Yes, I am, but not the infrastructure, cost focused CIO that exemplifies many enterprise CIOs.

I selected Social, Agile, and Transformation as key values for the roles I play, some more than others, including the startup CTO, the technology business strategist, the collaborator, the software architect, the head of the PMO, the data scientist, the product developer, the performance engineer and the CIO. More specifically

Social - Today's leader needs to be collaborative and be able to work across all levels of the organization. Innovation practices and tools are designed to bring forward the best ideas from the organization, but even better opportunities emerge when collaboration among individuals from multiple organizations solution and experiment. This is so important, that leaders need to demonstrate collaborative practices so that they can be emulated by managers, teams, and individuals.

Agile - Agile is a collaborative, disciplined practice for executing. It is especially successful practice when there is uncertainty in requirements and leveraged by teams to learn and modify priorities. The technology leader that embraces disciplined agile practices will find that they can execute on a wider range of projects and have a better relationship with business leaders.

Transformation - Innovation, disruption, culture and character are all fundamental values organizations target - but it's transformation that the technology organization can drive. Transformation is a mind set - that the team is driven by change, charged to improve things and driven to apply new technologies, techniques, or practices that enable the organization to "switch tracks" through transformation.

In short, Social + Agile leads to Transformation.

Some of my favorite posts:

Always looking for inspiration on what to cover on this blog!




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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.