Why doesn't more data produce better results?

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Data is treated as a source of untapped riches for businesses, promising a world of better insight and easier management. What's less discussed is how it's possible to drown in this ocean of information – more data sometimes just means more noise, and this is as true in IT as in any other profession.

Why doesn't more data produce better results? Is there a better way forward? And what does this mean for the end users? On this episode of the ITPro Podcast, Bobby Hellard and Ross Kelly talk to Fernando Castanheira, the CIO of Riverbed.

Castanheira's career has struck a balance between tech and finance, and how data is used to power businesses. He talks us through the mismatch between the amount of data available and how it's being used.

Highlights

"If I'm a service desk person, my job is to kind of make sure that everyone's able to do their jobs. There's no interruption, etc. I can come in and say, we have just introduced our third iteration of AI. We call it a queue. Queue is basically you're going away from dashboards, which everybody's got to go look at dashboards, to come across as more conversational. I can come in and say, "Hey, I'm the desk guy. What are the three or four items that I should focus on today so that I can improve my you know my my environment? And then based on the data that we've collected over the last 24 hours, a week, whatever it is, we come back with some suggestions."

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"These dashboards all look green, right? All look green on the outside, but you open things up on the inside, a lot of red. Because a lot of things are not working, even though the dashboards are looking green. So I think our approach is to make sure we kind of solve that by having very specific data, very specific recommendations, or very specific automation."

"The key thing is to have that foundation in place, and then we can act and enable things as you go forward, but it's a journey. You don't like go from zero to 100 overnight. You start with the easier stuff and then continue on that journey."

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Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognize him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.