For years, the technology department has been separated and shoved into a corner of the building far from the business side. Labeled the IT Department, the software engineers and developers have minimal contact with the analysts and marketing team aside from an email every now and then filled with pleas and tasks to complete. However, the increasing role of big data in business practices might just mean a structural overhaul is in the near future for many corporations.
In the eyes of Sanjeev Kumar, a lecturer of Technology and Operations at the Ross School of Business, the biggest practicality issue with big data is not a lack of data or the medium through which it is collected, it is a lack of organization, cooperation, and protocol. Much of the data sits in large Excel files that hold little to no meaning and the departments that need these files and the ones that can understand and utilize these files are largely disconnected. Further, the lack of policy regarding big data greatly limits the potential of businesses to use the mountains of data piled onto their servers; this effectively prevents the valuable data from being put to use.
The necessity of change was made clear to Dr. Kumar when working with a telecommunications company. As a telecom company, the business had collected a multitude of data regarding the most common locations of their customers. As the city began to build a subway, the possibility of selling this data in order to identify where the most effective placement of stations would be became a valuable idea that would prove beneficial to city planners and residents alike. However, the disconnect between the IT Department, the marketing team, and the entire business side of the entity resulted in months of attempting to find the data, authorization issues, and trying to make the data usable, profitable, and simply understandable.
This process could have been streamlined had the company issued simple protocol when beginning to collect data. The communication gap that results from the IT/Business divide is one that is costly, time-consuming, and poses a serious risk to business innovation. In a day and age where the data companies hold is continuously growing in value and potential, it is becoming increasingly vital that the divide between the two is eliminated.