Kim Stevenson, CIO Intel joined John Furrier and Dave Vellante in theCube in their ongoing coverage of IBM Edge 2013. The three discuss how a modern enterprise operates in the “sharing economy”, how big data can drive competitive advantage and why people don’t buy technology, but the benefits that it delivers.

Kim Stevenson begins by answering John Furriers question: what does a modern enterprise look like? Stevenson believes that big data and machine learning will be important to the personalization a modern enterprise ought to provide. For example, modern enterprise technology will be able to detect if a customer is in a positive or negative mood and make an offer informed by the consumer’s attitude.

At the management layer, Stevenson suggests the CIO also has to be modern in their approach. As she puts it, “I think its hard for traditional CIO teams to get out of that norm of just doing operational support and really doing transformation for the company.” She also suggests collaboration is important in the modern enterprise as her employees have reminded her of the importance of using the word “we” more instead of “I”.

Stevenson believes analytics is important to new technological discussions. She explains compute time is time to market in our case, because we’re compiling chip designs or doing regression analysis. She plainly and boldly adds, “SANS are history.”

One of the most powerful big data observations she’s made concerned a major profit opportunity for another CIO.  Another CIO had explained to Stevenson that if she could get data analytics consolidated across her company, they could double their bottom line. Stevenson adds what makes this note so interesting is that the data was completely internal. As she puts it, “It all exists within the company, it just isn’t used in a way to drive complete benefit.”