SEPTEMBER 2018CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8IN MY OPINIONJOHN C MARTIN, CIO, GEORGIA DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCESAh, might as well jump!"But you better put your helmet on"ome of you might recognize the article title as a line from the 1984 Van Halen song "Jump". It recently came to mind when I was thinking about the gathering storm around what is sometimes referred to as the "Data Gap". I am afraid a lot of professionals are either not aware of what is brewing or are choosing to ignore it. When you look at the numbers it is apparent that we are heading for a virtual cliff that may very well swallow us all. This isn't about today's buzzwords like; "Big Data", "Small Data", "Dark Data" or "Tail Data". You see, we as an industry are collecting data much quicker than we can consume it. When you look at the numbers, we in the United States alone are now creating over 25 petabytes per day. To put that in perspective, that is 25 quadrillion bytes or 25,000,000,000,000,000 bytes per day. How, you may ask, do we handle such volumes hitting our infrastructure daily. Not so well it turns out. According to Gartner, our ability to process data is doubling every 18 months which seems fantastic. Unfortunately, our data volume is increasing every 12 months! So, every year Swe are falling further behind in data collection vs. the ability to process. To make it worse when you add in that data complexity is doubling every four months, you might say to yourself, "Houston we have a problem". In addition, according to the article The Digital Universe in 2020 (John Gantz and David Reinsel), only 0.5 percent of global data is analyzed and just three percent of all data is currently tagged and ready for manipulation. However, it isn't all bad news. This widening data gap between organizational data and its potential customer value represents a significant opportunity for businesses worldwide. Therefore, as Van Halen says you "Might as well jump, go ahead and Jump", the "Data Gap" that is. You see, I think that Van Halen is speaking directly to you in their lyrics when they say "I get up, and nothin' gets me down. You got it tough, I've seen the toughest John C Martin
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