Events
"Knowledge management is needed for information to be retained in an organization even when people leave. You need a mechanism to capture that, and you need capable people to classify that information." — Avinash Arora, Director-IS, New Holland Tractors business decisions — which vendor to choose, which part has changed, what’s the version number of the part, what volume should be ordered — is different from how a showroom salesperson uses the same CAD designs to make a customer understand the features and functionalities of the automobile and make sales… Interpretation of the data varies within the departments across situations and geographies of the same organization.” Across the three discussions, there was consensus among CIOs to tag or label the information — better known as metadata. This would form the beginning of the process of bringing unstructured data into the structured world. “If you want structured output, you need to have structured inputs as well,” said Atul Kumar, Chief Manager-IT, Syndicate Bank. Interestingly, he stressed the fact that by limiting storage capacity to users in an organization, they would naturally begin to manage unstructured data
in order to use individual storage more efficiently. C.R. Narayanan, CIO of Alstom, concurred: “You need to have metadata — at least in a database, so that you are able to trace it and store it in a form that is retrievable over a period of time.” But even metadata throws up challenges, as Kailasnathan pointed out in Bangalore. “The meaning attached to a tag or metadata can change over time. It would depend on the meaning associated by the user who labelled it.” Even Arun Gupta, Director-IT, Philips Electronics, pointed out: “The real challenge is tagging data to say this is confidential and this is not. Here, tagging is perspective based on the person who owns the data.” Even as the end-user’s role in the process became apparent, the case for unstructured data in all three cities came back to the nature of technology at the disposal of the CIO. “There are hardly any tools today that I can apply to unstructured data, unlike those that are available for business intelligence … There is nothing that is generic to unstructured data, as it is in the case of structured information,” said Narayanan. Gupta mooted the same point at the discussion in Mumbai, “With key-words searches or heuristics tools, we can analyze trends of the unstructured data. Standard BI tools have not been very useful there, and we are hoping that software industry will come up with something useful for it.”
THE WAY FORWARD As of now, for enterprises in India dealing with foreign corporations, managing unstructured data is a matter of compliance — or working in accordance
The Mumbai panel, which stressed on tagging data, included (from left) Arun Gupta, Director of Philips Electronics India; Manish Choksi, VP (strategic planning & IT) of Asian Paints; Unni Krishnan T.K., CTO of Shopper’s Stop; and Vinod Sadavarte, CIO of Patni Computer Systems.
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JUNE 15, 2006 |
CIO
CUSTOM PUBLISHING
6/12/2006 5:04:51 PM