IT departments that succeed in turning data into actionable information will give their businesses a clear competitive advantage. Big data, and what we would call "big math," offers excellent opportunities for greater insight among business professionals. There are technical challenges in aggregating data in a wide variety of formats from a wide variety of sources at different velocities. However, a bigger challenge over time will be finding and developing the skill sets to derive insight from the data.

To attain these benefits, IT must have an overall consistent approach to enterprise architecture. We think of enterprise architecture as connecting the dots. Part of this, inasmuch as possible, is to have an adopted enterprise data model: what are the definitions of the key entities that your company deals with?