Do you work for one of the many companies waiting with bated breath for a vendor to deliver technology to answer all data questions? Think a shiny, patented software is going to come along and turn your data to dollars with the wave of a wand? Then this may surprise you: Companies already have the means to create value from data, and it’s not even a technology.

Bill Schmarzo, CTO of EMC’s Global Services Big Data, said what companies need in order to get value from data isn’t a technological shift, but a cultural one. He insisted that adopting a new mentality is the hard part, not the technology itself. He told Peter Burris (@plburris), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that businesses have typically asked questions of data endlessly, making little progress toward usability. Instead, he argued, they need to focus on decisions they need to make and avoid a morass of irrelevant data.

“The representation of the data in a manner that helps me to make better decisions is a really key point,” he said.

From cost to asset

Schmarzo said that businesses historically viewed data as a cost to be managed, but a revolution is underway whereby they will begin to see it as an asset. “We’re actually seeing more and more customers starting to realize that the data is an asset; I can’t put it on the books yet — yet being the key point — but I know it’s an asset.”

He enumerated three key areas a business needs to look at: Data, decisions, and analytics models. He said he sees too many businesses with orphan analytics — one-off models that solved one problem. He also stated the need to construct reusable models is necessary to generate consistent value from data.

Schmarzo went on to conclude that businesses need their data decisions to center around its “key business entities.” For example, if you are a school, those key entities would be students, teachers, courses, etc.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s Wikibon Weekly.

Photo by SiliconANGLE