He described how companies have always been aware of the massive amount of data they accumulate and due to constraints have had to analyze this data in subsets. This analysis has typically formed trends and insight to be then applied to larger data sets and scenarios. But this takes time and resource.

"With , new analytics tools and hardware developments, we can now analyze much bigger data sets and this can all occur much quicker than before," said Goodnight.

To CIOs, who are in fact the "information" officers of the business, this should be setting their world alight at the possibilities now available to them. But Goodnight observes that many CIOs are still burdened with trying to manage and maintain the infrastructure and have little time to support the information needs of business leaders. "Unfortunately when systems go down or when data is lost, it's the CIO that gets screamed at," he said. "It's a tough position for the CIO to be in but I think technologies exist today to help CIOs better manage data and provide improved access to that data for the business."

Increasingly there seems to be an information gap in terms of what companies want to leverage for decision-making versus having that information available for analysis. "Companies today still struggle to effectively target customers with truly relevant offerings, despite having more customer data than ever before," said Goodnight. "Any company should be able to consolidate all its data and build a complete profile of a customer but often the data is not consolidated or available to the right people within the business."