Big Data in the Real World Isn't So Easy

CIO — General Motors' OnStar service, which provides drivers with remote vehicle diagnostics and responds to emergencies, already manages as much as 3 petabytes of data annually. OnStar CIO Jeffrey Liedel knows there is so much more that can be done to exploit that data-for the benefit of drivers and GM's business.

For example, GM is pilot-testing a mobile app for its Chevrolet Volt electric car that would help drivers monitor their vehicle batteries and remotely manage charging them.

Competitors, including Nissan and Ford, offer similar capabilities to monitor electric vehicles, or they plan to. Drivers want manufacturers to alleviate their "range anxiety," or worry about whether an electric vehicle is about to run out of juice. But that's not all. "There's something about the electric vehicle —you want to be connected to it," Liedel says. "The customer is more interested in analytics: How well am I driving, driving patterns, what's my fuel economy." (The Volt can also run on gasoline.)

CIO — General Motors' OnStar service, which provides drivers with remote vehicle diagnostics and responds to emergencies, already manages as much as 3 petabytes of data annually. OnStar CIO Jeffrey Liedel knows there is so much more that can be done to exploit that data-for the benefit of drivers and GM's business.

For example, GM is pilot-testing a mobile app for its Chevrolet Volt electric car that would help drivers monitor their vehicle batteries and remotely manage charging them.

Competitors, including Nissan and Ford, offer similar capabilities to monitor electric vehicles, or they plan to. Drivers want manufacturers to alleviate their "range anxiety," or worry about whether an electric vehicle is about to run out of juice. But that's not all. "There's something about the electric vehicle —you want to be connected to it," Liedel says. "The customer is more interested in analytics: How well am I driving, driving patterns, what's my fuel economy." (The Volt can also run on gasoline.)

Electric vehicle owners aren't the only ones who want deeper insight from OnStar data. Internal business users and external partners want it, too. It falls to IT, Liedel says, to deliver the data in a way that is reliable, secure and flexible. "The key has been to recognize the importance of data and analytics," he says. "Even though sometimes it's not core to running a transactional system, it's a key part of running the business."

Not every CIO has to manage petabytes of information. But even companies that collect mere gigabytes of their own data are, increasingly, tapping information from outside their own systems. Having the capacity to process "big data" and the tools to analyze it effectively is becoming a competitive necessity.

"Every organization is trying to leverage the data that it has, or that is has access to, much better than they ever have before," observes Gavin Michael, chief technology innovation officer at Accenture, yet "a lot of companies have had small analytics groups. They've never seen it as an enterprise resource." CIOs are able to take an enterprise view of data, understand how to integrate it and help colleagues analyze it.

As a result, IT leaders are rethinking many aspects of how they manage and deliver information, from investments in infrastructure and analytics tools to new policies for organizing and accessing data so they can deliver more of it, faster.

Invest for Capacity and Speed

When Epic Advertising merged with Connexus in 2010 to form Epic Media Group, the combined companies were in the midst of a data explosion. Connexus, which at the time was serving ads to websites at a rate of 300 million per day, was running out of storage.