What are the challenges and barriers to the radical use of data and disruption of diverse businesses? There are three important factors.
First, the tools for making sense of data are still very primitive in the sense of their usability and composability with other business processes. They have been developed by and for data scientists. It will take considerable engineering work to make them more widely usable.
Second, there is a growing concern about who owns data and what is done with it. It is not the NSA that is the worry here, but rather search/advertising companies, who not only can learn a lot about you, but then make their money precisely by subsequently manipulating you with this information.
While it seems impossible to reliably contain the spread and leaking of personal data, it is in principle possible to regulate its use – this is the premise behind the notion of “data accountability”. After all, it is not who knows certain things about you that matters, but what they do with it. Whether we can evolve to a system that provides adequate protection and transparency of data remains to be seen.
Third, there is likely to remain a substantial skill shortage for some time. Computation and storage even at a large scale has been commoditised with cloud computing. But the process of extracting sense and meaning out of data is far from being a commodity.
Many businesses from banks to transport companies are now hiring data scientists or machine learning experts to help them ask the right questions of their data and process it appropriately. Businesses also need to adapt the way they think about what they do and especially how they can deal with uncertainty. Merely measuring everything does not give certainty – all the data in the world will still not help you predict the future, but it will give you some clues.
The businesses and countries that stay ahead with big data analytics are going to be the winners of the 21st century.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.
