The 3G Shutdown Is Coming – Is Your Fleet Prepared or in the Dark?
In an information-rich age companies can drown in the deluge of data or harness it to gain competitive advantage and revolutionise their business. Put that way, there's not really much of a choice. If you're collecting megadata – and if you have a Teletrac Navman system, you are – then you'd be nuts not to use it to take your business forward.
The problem in most companies lies not in whether to use it, but in how to mine it in useful ways. Increasingly, they are adopting a new senior management function, that of the Chief Data Officer, or CDO, to lead the governance, strategy and utilisation of corporate data.
According to leading US research company, Gartner, the CDO is a senior executive who bears responsibility for the company's enterprise-wide data and information strategy, governance, control, policy development and effective exploitation. The role combines accountability and responsibility for information protection and privacy, information governance, data quality and data life cycle management, along with the exploitation of data assets to create business value.
The role of CDO is relatively new in the corporate world. In fact, two-thirds of CDO positions have been created within just the past three years. Gartner predicts that 50% of all companies in regulated industries will have a CDO by 2017.
Wired Magazine says the split of this function from IT departments recognises that in a business setting data is separate from the systems running it.
The difference between CIOs and CDOs is that CDOs play more of a risk, compliance, policy management, and business role. CDOs drive information and analytics strategy, serving a business purpose. CIOs are often involved in designing the CDO role, which may report to them or function in a parallel position reporting to the COO or CFO.
Peter Aiken, author of The Case for the Chief Data Officer (Morgan Kaufmann, 2013), sees the CDO as a transitional position, with specific goals to accomplish. One of those goals is to help IT change its views about data. He notes that the IT department has tended to look at data as storage, whereas people really need to see data as an asset.
Making sense of data and using it as an asset was one of the driving forces behind the release of Teletrac Navman' Adaptive Intelligence solution last year. The cloud-based business-intelligence-as-a-service tool helps organisations measure and manage fleet expenditure and leverage their own data for KPI based decision-making and insights into future trends. While traditional business intelligence solutions struggle to capture data from 'plant and people', Adaptive Intelligence enables enterprises to further drill-down on data and draw informative insights by adapting to an organisation's customisable needs and software solutions already in place.
While appointing a Chief Data Officer may remain the domain of large organisations, viewing your data as an asset and working out how to use it to create business value is within the reach of any sized business.
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