Events with legal and regulatory guidelines. There is no way around the task of transforming unstructured data into structured information. In fact, as Sridhar of Hutch said, “Compliance can be the CIO’s passport to walk up to the CEO with the issue of unstructured data, and also sensitize his team about it.” For other companies in India, it is a matter of understanding unstructured data at two levels: - How to leverage the enormous value posed by unstructured data? - How to conserve time that would otherwise be spent in searching through unstructured data? Alstom’s Narayanan reiterated the latter point during the panel discussion in Delhi, from the standpoint of a multi-location business. “You need to service the learnings and information for future projects — they need to be documented and kept. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel, especially if you have projects that are similar to ones you have done in the recent past. With more competition, storage and retrieval of information is crucial because cycle time is coming down. And that is a business case for unstructured data.” He also pretty much summed up the need of the hour, vis-à-vis unstructured information. “Data redundancy is multiplying manifold. How do you take care of this? If it is a multi-locational enterprise [like ours], we need a system that has a bandwidth and data centre that is able to cope with the data requirement of a single place on such a single. We need to move towards technology that has very good compression or a good cache.” Beyond technology, Choksi revealed one approach to secure business buy-in to tackle unstructured
"In the wake of regulatory compliance, how do you ensure that unstructured data is both accessible and easily retrievable?” — Vijay Ramachandran, Editor, CIO
data. “CIOs should go to one or two business stakeholders who believe that there is a significant amount of unstructured data in their business transactions, and try to run pilot projects and build a content management or a knowledge management system. This will help them demonstrate to their managements that they have managed to improve productivity and thus demonstrate the value of the data to business. The onerous task of organizing unstructured data might be likened with an artist obsessing about bringing form to content. Seen another way, the case of such data is simply a testament to how vast and accessible communication and technology have become in modern enterprise. CIO
Storage and retrieval is absolutely crucial, agreed the Delhi panel that featured (from left) Avinash Arora, Director-IS of New Holland Tractors; C.R. Narayanan, CIO of Alstom; Rajesh Uppal, GM-IT of Maruti Udyog; and Tamal Chakraborty, CIO of Ericsson India.
The panel in Bangalore noted that the CIO must sensitize management about the need to process unstructured data. It comprised (from left) N. Kailasnathan, CIO & Vice President (IT); Atul Kumar, Chief Manager (IT), Syndicate Bank; and S. Sridhar, Head-IT, Hutch.
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