When I was 10 years old, I would spend hours in the local library poring over books and recording pages and pages of notes, trying to soak up all the information I could. I was steadily building my knowledge bank so I would be ready with all the answers, whether I was applying that knowledge to write a book report or impress my parents with my rapid recall of statistics and facts about the world. I fast forward to today when my 8-year-old son calls out questions to the device on my kitchen counter and immediately gets answers, without having to access any websites, dig through books, or even leave his own house looking for that exact fact. In essence, learning from data that may be housed in a data lake instead of a structured data warehouse or in a book. The world has changed. We have volumes of data generated simply because of our ability to capture it – we are no longer limited to transactional systems or data captured only by written form. While the amount of data available is exponentially increasing, however, truly capitalizing on its value is dependent on having access when and how we need it. As technology leaders, we have the responsibility to make this data accessible so that it can be transformed into even more valuable information.

As a popularly covered topic in tech and management publications, some may ask, haven’t we solved for that? Well, we’ve had a good start, but I would argue that new challenges have emerged. Information is not structured in the way it used to be instead it is being captured as both structured and unstructured data sets. As we lead our organizations forward, we must empower users through data democratization – putting the data in the hands of the end users so they can transform it into information in a relevant and meaningful way. The concept is powerful, and many organizations are embracing it, but the challenge of how to do it effectively remains a barrier. What are the stages of capturing the unstructured data, processing it and then allowing access to query it. On top of that, how do you manage the access and levels of security. These are challenging new questions that technology leaders face today.