Ashit Panjwani

Handling Information explosion.

Most of us who are in IT industry would have read ,heard or are experiencing the explosive growth of data or information. Some of the interesting statistics coming from industry pundits states that data was doubling after every 1100 days in 2005, in 2007 its doubling after every 11 months and its expected to double after every 11 hours in 2010.

The answer doesn’t lie in increasing the storage capacity in our organization inspite of reduction in storage costs, as the recent report from one the leading analyst group states that in 2007 for the first time ever the amount of digital information which would be generated would surpass the storage capacity. One of the prudent approach than would be to have an infrastructure which will allow most of the information go by pass our heads and extract the meaning the intelligence which can be consumed by various stakeholders with in our enterprise. Having said this the amount of investment be it in form of dollars, time spent on analyzing the information/extracting intelligence from the information is much less as compared to what organizations spent in collecting the information be it in form of their transaction systems, web, call centre etc. I would argue that needs to change, I believe its important for organization to visit their IT plans and incorporate strategies of analyzing the information which they have been collecting over a period of time. If organizations are not able to leverage the information in generating intelligence than there is hardly any use of collecting information. This applies to all the organization across industry segment, govt. included. For eg. Lets talk about customer retention which has emerged as no.1 priority for most of the organization. Customer before churning out gives enough opportunities to an organization in form of various verbal/written communication expressing his dissatisfaction or frustration, more often than not these interactions are captured by various transactional systems in form of CRM or others. The question is do organizations have right infrastructure to analyse the verbal/written interaction of those frustrated lot and determine which customers are fence sitters and are most vulnerable. Do they have right campaigns/communication strategy to retain those customers?. There are number organizations who are using power of analytics to compete in today’s environment. Recently released book “Competing on Analytics” written by Thomas Davenport is an excellent read and offers some great examples on how analytics can play strategic role in increasing competitiveness of organizations.

posted by Ashit Panjwani @ 3:27 AM