Go to SearchCIO.com Searchlight

Could someone get him out of here? He’s very distracting.

Go to SearchCIO.com Searchlight

                   Both brains and beauty!

Go to SearchCIO.com Searchlight

Remember this? Still unimpressed by the iPhone 5?

You may be the smartest candidate for the job, but sometimes it’s all about social connections. This holds true in the Bing versus Google battle for search supremacy.  Despite having what may be the smartest computer learning system in the world, the Microsoft-owned search engine lags far behind Google. Why? It’s all about the massive amount of personal information Big Brother Google captures about users.

If CIOs don’t think they have to compete for the business of internal customers, chances are they’ve already lost them. Check out these expert tips on keeping IT competitive and relevant to the business. While you’re at it, read why we think this just might be the new CIO benchmark.

What’s a little privacy when there’s money to be saved on diapers and coffee? In a quest to create competitive advantage supermarket chains put big data analytics into action by offering customers individualized pricing based on their shopping habits.

Instagram: It’s not just for shoe-gazing hipsters anymore. Increasingly, big-name companies like Starbucks, GE and Nike are leveraging the popular photo app to gather customer data.

Finally, in case you missed it, check out this week’s installment of CIO Matters in which news director Linda Tucci makes a case for the CIO’s need to know just how “green” cloud computing really is and why it matters to us all.

Zynga may want to have a word with friends. Opinion is rife that Facebook doesn’t have the company’s best interests at heart.

We now know one outlet where BlackBerry users won’t be reading more bad news for RIM.

Where there’s money, there are criminals. Hot on the heels of tech innovation that makes your smartphone a virtual wallet comes a tech innovation that virtually steals that wallet.

Who doesn’t like a good chart? We especially like this one which attempts to diagram the main routes to unified information access (UIA) across silos when dealing with big data.

Finally, be sure to check out this week’s CIO Matters, wherein our crusading columnist Wendy Schuchart saves the day with awesomely powerful leadership lessons CIOs can glean from superheroes. Kapow!

• If, upon seeing Google’s new Nexus Q streaming media device, your first reaction was “I wanna crack it open and see what’s inside!” this is the story for you. Geek.
• Problematic moniker aside, we love the idea of Girls Who Code, a collaborative effort among tech companies including IBM, GE and Twitter aimed at opening opportunities for young women in computer science.
• IBM engineers analyze data related to Boston traffic and come up with software solution. Oh please, in the name of all the dashboard saints, get the app for that, Beantown.
• Did everyone change their darn LinkedIn passwords? Good. Now read these pro tips on protecting data .
• Nothing lasts forever – except everything you do online. Here’s the bazillionth “shining” example, courtesy of Forbes contributor Deanna Zandt.
• Did we say nothing lasts forever? We hope this nerd love does.  At  least we know the site will go on, even if their hearts don’t.

But is concern about data quality misplaced? There are at least two competing theories about this: what I’ll call the old school view and the big data movement. The old school view is that data quality matters: garbage in, garbage out. Thus, time is spent on data cleansing, extracting, transforming and so forth, and the strong belief is that this is time well-spent.

The big data movement has spawned a different worldview on data quality: the bigger, the better. The central idea here is that data-crunching in itself is cleansing. Things that don’t fit into the data model are like flotsam and jetsam — an insignificant, superficial layer on your deep ocean of insight.

In the real world, I’m finding that CIOs understand the big data quality perspective — and some would like to embrace it — but the old school wins out. And that’s not because these CIOs are risk-averse. Case in point is Greg Taffet, CIO at U.S. Gas & Electric, a Miami-based reseller of gas and electricity. The fast-growing company has doubled in size in every one of the last four years that Taffet has been there. Not that he’s complaining. He’s one of those CIOs who like to be where the action is. “I was previously the CIO and employee No. 4 at MXenergy, and left when it hit $1 billion in revenue. I was recruited here to do the same,” he said.

But the ever-changing business fundamentals make building “a real BI environment,” as he puts it, particularly challenging. When it comes to data quality, Taffet is definitely old-school: “The tools are really not that distinguishable. We have to know our business. We have to get into the minds of the executives and the operational people, so we can set up the tools to do their job.” For him, data quality is the bedrock of a real BI environment.

So, amid a whirlwind of growth, Taffet and his BI team meet weekly with people from finance, operations and sales to make sure there’s no disagreement about the quality of the data IT is collecting. “When we see something that is not expected, we drill down into the details and see if it is a variation on something that was not accounted for but should be, or something that should be taken out,” he said. It’s time well spent, he says, toward building that real BI environment.

But then Taffet’s not dealing with the volumes of data that qualify as big data — yet. “I still see that we have several years before we get hit with what we call big data,” he said. And until the tsunami hits, he’s sticking with old school. You?

Big data can help an information security strategy, he said. Really? From what I’ve been hearing from CIOs and chief information security officers, big data — information coming in and out of an organization from all over — is a security threat. I had never heard about big data improving information security strategies.

Crawford enlightened me by explaining that data-driven security — or using technologies like data mining, data analytics and quantitative statistics — is a great way to spot security threats and trends.

“Analyzing big data can give you quicker insights into large volumes of data and security problems, and you can use real-time event alerting,” he said.

In a recent blog post, Crawford explains:

“The data explosion is just as real in security as elsewhere. And just as with other aspects of the intelligence-driven enterprise, big data offers new challenges — and new opportunities. Much more information is available than ever before that can help enterprises identify previously unrecognized threats, sharpen their defenses and acquire the awareness needed to develop more effective risk management programs. Today, techniques are emerging for harnessing this data to improve countermeasures and expand strategic insight.”

Crawford explains his theory in great depth in a five-part series on the rise of data-driven security.

As for the original security topic? Remote access security policies in a BYOD era? Data-loss prevention tools are not a silver bullet, he said. But that’s a topic for another time.

Let us know what you think about this blog post; email: Christina Torode, News Director