Last week I presented this topic to professional women at PWI here in Brussels. It’s called ‘small talk’ because it is not a technical presentation but one for a broader audience, to create awareness on this Big Data trend. The main concept I wanted them to take away is the change in the business arena and in our society due to Big Data. If you are interested on this subject, just drop a line and let me know!
Prices of discs and storage devices have dropped a lot, so now basically any digital data is being stored. Cost is so low, that it is worth to save it ‘just in case, and we’ll see in the future what we can do with this data’. Technology has made also huge advances with massive parallel processing, and we can manage to jungle through thousands of servers to analyse a bunch of diverse data and extract information from it in a usable time-frame.
This allows business strategists to make smarter decisions based on facts, better than how it was done before, based on experience or intuition. So the message for all decision-makers is: go and check your data, you’ll find there valuable information to decide any business matter. Also, be aware that your competition is going into it too, it can out-smart you!
At the society level, there are many ethical issues to deal with, like privacy or equality and fairness. What to you think, is it fair to have a subsidy that is ‘personalised’, that may give more to someone than to others because of a particular factor, or allow access to a health treatment to someone and not to another based on his life expectancy for example? What about basing the decision on his ‘ROI’ like the capability of paying back for the given treatment? Or is it more fair to have instead equality on subsidies, same amount for everyone? Even for the ones that could pay it by themselves? Either we discuss them before-hand, or we will be at the mercy of any politician or entrepreneur taking a step deeper in an unethical direction.
And as a last twist, I would like to point out that the basic value of knowledge is challenged. We are already experiencing a change of values, knowledge is less and less valued as an asset anymore, but value remains in knowing how to get to the knowledge,where to find it and what to extract from data.
