via the Data Marketing Newsletter

In today's newsletter, we asked Brenda Byers, CIPS Chair, how data management evolved in the past few years and how marketing and IT can deliver the highest value possible to their customers.

CIPS is an association of individual IT professionals. Since 1958 CIPS has helped strengthen the Canadian IT industry by establishing standards and sharing best practives for the benefit of individual IT professionals and the sector as a whole.

CIPS has always worked on data management and processing… what changed in the previous years? How did your members react?

Yes, we’ve focused on data processing since the birth of the CIPS in 1958, but the past two years have brought new challenges. As Steve Henderson, Director of Sales, Global Technology Services, for IBM pointed out in an event I attended: “90% of the world’s data was created over the last 2 years, 80% is unstructured”… Although our members had been equipped with data warehouses and BI tools for a long time, this flood of data changed their approach. What really changed in their day-to-day practice was the availability of social data and geographic location… but also the fact that Business Intelligence was no longer for big companies only. Suddenly, SMEs had access to analytics as well, to decipher their customers’ needs or to sell advertising space on Internet. For me, customization and geographic location have been the two main innovations brought by Big Data.

(read the article)