Harvard Business Review : The Talent Issue

The Talent Issue is a general management magazine, published by Harvard Business School Publishing. To build a smarter planet, we need smarter computing Computing that is tuned to the task, management through th cloud and, importantly, designed for big data.

How big? We\'re now creating 2.5 quintillion bytes daily so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been in the last two years alone. This data is also in its promise. We now have the capacity to understand, with greater precision than ever before, how our world actually works. We can also draw on advanced technologies such as stream computing, which filters gigabytes of data per second, analyses these while they\'re still in data, such as real-time alert or storing an insight in a data warehouse for later analysis.

Yet according to the IBM Business Analytic and Optimisation for the Intelligent Enterprise study, one in three business leaders frequently make decisions without the information they need. Half don\'t have access to the information they need to do their jobs. The 2010 Global CFO study by the IBM Institute for Business Value showed that companies that excel at finance efficiency and have more mature business analytic and optimisation outperform their peers with 49% higher revenue growth, 20 times more profit growth, and 30% higher return on invested capital. With continuously analysed data, organisation can be what they want to be, at all times. Fresh food grower Sun World International is leveraging insights from their data to cut natural resource used by 20% Research at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology is developing streaming 43 million streaming data points per patient, per day, they can improve patient outcomes by using all of the available. As our world gets smaller, our data keeps getting bigger which lets us see our planet in entirely new way and allows us to intervene to make it work better.