So you thought you were suffering from information overload? Well, as the saying goes, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

According to research by Deloitte, some 20 billion gigabytes of new digital data will be created this year.

The prediction makes no estimate for how much of the huge quantities of information being generated will actually be worth keeping, but you can bet that most of it will be finding its way into your IT systems. Is it any wonder that the most talked-about technology company is Google, the search engine that aims to provide us with rapid access to as much of that data as possible?

But finding data is the easy part – turning it into value for business or government is a different matter. And with the rapidly falling cost of disk storage, there will inevitably be a tendency to add more and more capacity to cope, making the challenge of finding meaningful information, rather than simply storing and retrieving random bits and bytes, even greater.

In politics, it is said that information is power. In business it is certainly the key to competitive success. The company that gets its hands first on that vital piece of information for a crucial decision is increasingly the one with the biggest profits.

The IT department’s historic role in managing the data mountain has typically been that of curator – making sure the data is in the right place at the right time for others to use, and providing the right tools to help decision-makers in the boardroom.

But for many IT leaders, the time is fast approaching when they will have to decide whether their role is to focus on the ‘I’ in their title, or the ‘T’.

As the basic technology is increasingly commoditised and outsourced, the skills of the IT team turn to the creation of value from the information it manages.

Those IT directors who can establish a position as the provider of useful, relevant, competitive information will be the ones at the heart of their organisation’s success.