The web that you browse day in and day out, your files and folders on your system, your friends name and numbers in the Contact list of your phones,, you are surrounded by Data almost every time. This was however just a glimpse of Data we use on personal level. On larger scale, Facebook, a social-networking website, is home to 40 billion photos, Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes—the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress.
All these examples tell the same story: that the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on.
Easy access
There are many reasons for the information explosion. The most obvious one is technology. As the capabilities of digital devices soar, sensors and gadgets are digitising lots of information that was previously unavailable. And many more people have access to far more powerful tools.
Moreover, there are now many more people who interact with information. The rich, the literates fuel the information growth.
Who handles and takes care of Data?
Though Chief information officers (CIOs) play a major role in creating and and managing Data, they have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite. Now new kinds of professionals have emerged, the data scientists, who combine the skills of software programmers, statisticians and storytellers/artists Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around.
The Tech Leaders’ speak
Mr Mundie of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, sit on a presidential task force to reform American health care. “Early on in this process Eric and I both said: ‘Look, if you really want to transform health care, you basically build a sort of health-care economy around the data that relate to people’,” Mr Mundie explains. “You would not just think of data as the ‘exhaust’ of providing health services, but rather they become a central asset in trying to figure out how you would improve every aspect of health care. It’s a bit of an inversion.”
“The data-centred economy is just nascent,” admits Mr Mundie of Microsoft. “You can see the outlines of it, but the technical, infrastructural and even business-model implications are not well understood right now.”
Different kinds of Data:
- Purchase Data (including credit card info)
- Search Data (query, path taken, history)
- Social Graph Data (identity, friend data)
- Interest Data (Likes, tweets, recommendations, links)
- Location Data (ambient as well as declared/checked in)
- Content Data (Journey through content, likes, engagement, "behavioral")
Security concerns
Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.
Consumers are consuming extraordinary amounts of data. Hundreds of millions of mobile phones weave infinite tapestries of data, in real time. Each purchase, search, status update, and check-in layers our world with more of it. How our industries respond to this opportunity will determine the success and failure not only in the networked economy, but also the future texture of our culture.
