CIOs are Information Officers and not ICT Officers.
The Digital World creates sheer endless amounts of data (Big Data). The most important challenge is to select the right data and to transform it into information needed for your business processes. Business Intelligence (BI) techniques and analytical skills will be crucial to analyse the data and convert it to SMART data and ultimately to useful information.
As an example: installing smart energy meters will allow you to capture energy consumption on a 15-minute basis. This amount of data is not necessary in order to send monthly invoices for energy consumption. But if you connect the smart meter to a Home Energy System and link them to solar panel production data, you can optimize energy consumption in peak moments by using IoT technology. In order to allow these new ways of working, Big Data has to be transformed into Smart Data and transformed into information (ex. determine the moment when devices should be activated during peak periods).
In order to select the right data, it is necessary to understand from a business point of view, what data is relevant, and can lead to information. Smart data is not just about getting to know your business better, it can also create new business models.
The enterprise BI and analytics market is undergoing a huge evolution, according to Gartner, with a wider range of business users now demanding access to interactive styles of analysis and insights from advanced analytics outside of IT and with no training in data science. IT of course wants to deliver upon this newfound requirement for pervasive access to data discovery without sacrificing the governance protocols that made large scale IT-led reporting projects successful in the past.