The board will give you all the funding you need for big data when you show them quick ROI, says Hotels.com CTO

Thierry Bedos says best way to get backing is deploying a 'gated approach' but warns firms not to concentrate solely on a quick ROI

One of the main sticking points for CIOs in implementing a big data strategy is getting backing from the board, and according to Hotels.com CTO Thierry Bedos, the best way to do this is a "gated approach" by which the IT department can prove it can make a return on investment (ROI) quickly.

Bedos, who was speaking at Computing's fourth Big Data Summit in London, explained that this is how his firm managed to get the full backing of the board. His team put forward 170 big data use cases, and aimed to deliver 10 within a short time frame.

However, his team realised that what was initially a project for database consolidation turned into a huge strategic overhaul, with investment made in Hadoop and Cassandra.

Bedos said that by focusing first on use cases that deliver a quick ROI, CIOs can buy themselves time to work on other use cases. It is a balance, he said, between a quick ROI and putting in place a long-term architecture.

He admitted that his team initially focused far too much on delivering a quick ROI.

"We tried to deliver 10 of the 170 user cases in a short time frame, but even though we delivered them, they weren't consolidated so we had to go back and do that - it's about keeping a balance between short-term and long-term benefits," he said.

In terms of convincing the board to initially back the strategy, Bedos claimed that this wasn't particularly tough.

"Once we had put up the credible use cases it wasn't difficult to justify some of the investment but we had to show quick ROI, because we were not asking for a small amount of money - so there's not a long time to produce results," he said.

He added that after achieving quick wins, CIOs must then press on and try to achieve benefits from more challenging use cases.