Organisations will benefit more if they turned the piles of static data within their organisations into information. This was the message from Dr Katherine Getao, ICT Secretary, at Kenya's Directorate of eGovernment when addressing participants of this years CIO Year Ahead briefing. Dr Getao said many industries are now streaming real time data that used to be the preserve of the stock markets. "but the patterns have change for those who can see them and signals for those who can hear them, you need to make data think for you" she said. Dr Getao says data needs to be collected and converted into information that will think for us.

The early morning event at the Crowne Plaza Nairobi, attracted various technology professionals and industry players to discuss topics that are likely to dominate the IT space this year, including IT Service Management, Cloud Computing, IT Consumerisation and Big Data as trends that will shape 2012.

Dr Getao urged the audience not to concentrate only on static data held in various repositories but use dynamic data tied up in daily transactions like cards and mobile money to improve their intuition and profitability. For instance, data from Mpesa transactions may be used to build intelligent applications, which are more responsive and efficient. Today, responsiveness is more profitable for a business on the other hand efficiency alone will kill the company.

She gave an example of Singapore traffic system that auto-detects vehicles as they use the road and taxes them. This real time data is made open and therefore application are build on the same. Dr Getao challenged City Council of Nairobi representatives to automate their systems which capture a lot of data, make the data open and allow people to build applications around the same.

Jumping over to the cloud, John Waibochi, CEO Virtual City says this year users will engage cloud services unknowingly as a result of the integration and ease of use of cloud based applications. He said most data will be held in cloud environments or will be "touched by cloud," which means data will either transit through a cloud service or temporarily held in a cloud application. Since most of this data will either live or pass in the cloud, mobile payments will be integrated in this platform which will also handle queries from applications.

In future most companies won’t manage the projected cost of storage; "they won’t go down the road of onsite storage because it is expensive," Waibochi said. They will turn to specialized cloud providers who have the capacity to handle enormous amount of storage. “The challenge is to bring cloud to these companies without overwhelming them”, Waibochi continued.

With the cloud, organizations will not need to build data centers but can lease one from various cloud providers. The CIO Year Ahead is a half-day session where CIOs and other senior IT executives share their insights on what technologies might shape the coming year.