We have seen that Big Data is not just big: It is also a disorderly sprawl of unstructured information that poses new challenges for data governance and compliance.
Big Data can also become a useless, costly burden – unless it ends up providing us with the information we need to make smarter, quicker, better business decisions.
Converting raw data into actionable decision points is the domain of Business Intelligence (BI). Enterprise interest in BI has been growing enormously over the last few years, 40 percent over four years according to Gartner. But the bad news is that the performance of BI, so far, has been decidedly mixed. One study concluded that, over the last ten years, only 10 percent of major BI implementations have been successful.
Why such a poor track record? Too many BI implementations have turned out to be slow, cumbersome to use, and not readily available to the decision workers who need the insights that BI is supposed to provide.
The need to apply BI to Big Data is not going to make it any easier. But it has to be done.
And doing BI well is inherently challenging. The end users of BI are not, for the most part, IT professionals. They do not have the time, inclination, or skillset to puzzle their way through steep learning curves. But dumbing BI down to pretty graphics with minimal information is no solution: The whole point of BI, after all, is intelligence.
To make BI work in the Big Data era, the IT department must learn to see itself as an information switching system. It pulls data out of peripheral silos, funneling it to the switching center. From there the information must be sent out again, through a mixture of enterprise and self-service BI tools, to reach end users in a form they are able to use.
Done right – and only when done right – the end result will be "business intelligence right now" (BIRN), giving decision workers both the information and the information-manipulation tools they need to make fast, informed decisions.
The security principles set forth in industry standard ISO/IEC 27002 provide a framework for effective security, built around the cycle of Plan, Do, Check, and Act (PDCA). Many good security products are on the market, but all are designed to meet specific threats – and will not block other threats. At GRT Corp. our security philosophy is built around these words by noted security expert Dr. Bruce Schneier: "Security is not a product, but a process."
