Bangalore: CIOs must realize that innovation needs to go well beyond the technology used to manage big data, according to Gartner, Inc. To get maximum value, enterprises will need to seek and embrace innovation in the way business problems are analyzed with big data.

"Big data requires an enterprise to embrace innovation on two levels," said Hung LeHong, research vice president at Gartner. "First, the technology itself is innovative. Second, enterprises must be willing to innovate in the way they do decision support and analytics. This second reason is not a technology challenge, but rather a process and change management challenge.

"Big data technologies bring innovative ways of analyzing existing business problems and opportunities. New data sources and new analytics can improve the enterprise in ways that have never been leveraged before."

Big data's ability to analyze unstructured data, large volumes and disparate sources leads to innovative opportunities. In most cases, there has been very little precedence for the ways big data can add value to an enterprise. It was never possible to run these kinds of analyses or access these new types of data. Seeking value from big data technologies requires innovative thinking and a willingness to accept and trust these sources and methods. CIOs should treat big data projects as innovation projects that will require change management efforts. The business will need time to trust new data sources and new analytics and enterprises should start small with pilots that put full transparency on the data, the analytics and the resulting insight.

However, big data isn't just about the large sources of external data, such as public social network data. Creative CIO thinking can unearth valuable information sources already inside the enterprise that are underused.

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