Imagine the challenge of owning warehouses of books and only a small fraction of them had titles. Yet, they all needed to be cataloged and stored correctly by content.

This is the type of challenge confronting many chief data officers today and is not unlike a real-life dilemma that one CDO had to face.

Mark Ramsey (pictured), chief data and analytics officer at Ramsey International LLC, had a project where he collected 15 petabytes of data and only one petabyte was structured. It was an interesting challenge because, to put things in perspective, two petabytes of data equal all the material contained in academic research libraries within the U.S. The solution was advanced analytics.

“It’s extremely important with unstructured data to apply advanced analytics against the data to go through a process of making sense of that information,” Ramsey said. “In this vast store of documents, somebody has probably uploaded the cafeteria menu from 10 years ago. You have to apply the technology in that first step of classification.”

Ramsey spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the MIT CDOIQ Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They discussed mistakes organizations make in leveraging data and the importance of deriving strategic value through comprehensive analytics and management (see the full interview with transcript here).

No limits for machine-learning models

Over his nearly 35 years of experience within the data management field, Ramsey has seen organizations fall prey to a number of common mistakes. One of them is using analytics on a small portion of data rather than aggressively going after the entire library of information.

This makes it hard to train useful machine-learning models when the pipeline of knowledge is limited.

“I’ve not seen organizations tackle their own data landscape challenges and really do it in an aggressive way to get value out of the data that’s within their four walls,” Ramsey said. “It’s always, ‘Let’s do this small proof of concept; let’s take this very narrow chunk.’ What inevitably ends up happening is that becomes the only solution they build.”

The key, according to Ramsey, is to leverage organizational data for its strategic value.

“The most critical thing is understanding the strategic objectives of the organization and how data will be used differently in the future to drive decisions and actions and the effectiveness of the business,” Ramsey explained. “A true CDO is maximizing the strategic value of data within the organization. How do you triple the size of your business by using data as a strategic advantage?”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the MIT CDOIQ Symposium.

Photo: SiliconANGLE