Businesses must deal with ‘information overload’

Businesses and the government must find a way to manage the information explosion so they can use data to make decisions more quickly.

Arvind Krishna, general manager for information systems at IBM, claims that new systems were needed to store all the streams of data that enterprises and public sector organisations now have to deal with.

At IBM's Information on Demand conference in Las Vegas, he said: "When you look at the volume of information coming at us from all of these sources business applications, sensors, from the physical world there's a variety."

"It's not just numerical information. There's also text, emails, all kinds of information coming at us, whether it is enterprises or government," he added.

Krishna said that the problem was exacerbated by the speed at which decisions needed to be made. "Store managers are looking at retail data and what's selling every few minutes," he said.