Almost half--45 percent--of the 1,375 executives in a recent survey of executives by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services strongly agreed that information is the key strategic asset to their companies. They identified the need to leverage customer information to improve services, increase loyalty and grow sales as the most important strategies for growth in the coming years.
But only 7 percent of those leaders said their organizations are very well positioned to exploit information to help grow their business. And despite the high value that executives place on information from their customers, fewer than half of the respondents--44 percent--said their organizations are managing information security threats, such as customer and company data theft, well.
In a recent HBR webinar, those issues and the best practices for aligning technology with business strategy were discussed by David Thompson, CIO of Symantec, and Brad Wyckoff, CIO of the publishing powerhouse Meredith Corporation. Wyckoff said that there is often a critical gap between the c-suite and the IT organization around who "owns" information in the company.
As Wyckoff points out, we certainly have the capability to generate and collect large volumes of data. We continuously assess tools and practices to more effectively manage, store, protect, retrieve, and transport that data. More important, we work to do something intelligent with the data, allowing us to deliver measurable benefits for our customers and, ultimately, for Meredith.
"The perception of some executives is that we don't have the right tools and database structure, that we simply don't have the ability to provide them with an "intelligible view" of the data.
"But as an IT leader, it's my responsibility to initiate a dialogue with them: What is it they really want to do with the data? What value does that data have toward growing the business and delivering services to our customers? Once we answer these questions, then we can work to meet their business requirements with the appropriate technology solutions.
David Thompson who works with business unit leaders within his own company, as well as CI0s globally, said that executives the outside function are looking for return on investment data, in the wake of the recession. "There are many barriers to using information to drive business growth.
They could be organizational silos, the lack of data integration, complex technology systems, or even a lack of analytical skills among business leaders," Thompson said. "Over the years, executives have spent millions on tools and technology and many, in the end, didn't see the business value from it or didn't achieve the synergy expected. Among my peers, this is the challenge: to help business overcome those barriers and help leaders to get connected to how they can use information to drive their business."
The survey suggests CIOs are in a difficult spot, Thompson said. Companies want to get more value from information assets and keep costs down, yet data pours in from many more devices and sources. "Company data is doubling every year, but not all data adds value," he said. "In many cases, the new data can create risk for the organization because it is unmanaged or is not being maximized for the corporation. Video or music files are good examples. So you need to understand what types of data you have, where it is, how it is being used, and what is--and is not--of value to your business. Then you can more effectively manage it, archive what you don't need, secure the right data, and make it more readily available to the right people.
Companies also are struggling with the need to balance the competing imperatives of increased openness and accessibility on the one hand and greater security on the other, Thompson said. Data is moving out to employees and partners who need information to serve customers more effectively. That's where it adds value, but also where it increases risk. Information systems were once centralized and data couldn't leave the data center easily. Now data leaves the enterprise traveling on laptops and mobile devices. So, you must have protections and risk mitigation strategies in place to prevent misuse, theft, or loss of data.
For example, our data loss prevention toolset examines confidential data across the entire infrastructure and identifies if data is moving, how it is moving--whether it leaves the enterprise or move desktops or to different servers. With it you can classify information and assign rules for the movement and access to that information."
