At the Epicenter is DATA
“Data is the new oil” — Clive Humby
Back in 2006, Clive Humby proclaimed data as the new oil in the age of Iraq war and rising oil (real oil) prices. It may be a blasphemous statement to make back then, but it was a statement which would come to define the world. There are multiple happenings around the world that are dictating the dynamics among the countries and livelihood of the people, but the epicenter of every happening and output in the world begins and ends with data.
Data is something that determines everything in the world and the world of analysts, data engineers and data scientist have identified the wonders hidden in data and how it can change the world. Before we go into the different spheres of the influence of data and how data gets used to influence these spheres, there is something very important to understand when you get associated with data.
Data forms the concept of garbage in and garbage out where the data reliability in terms of accuracy and completeness become important. One can play around with a data in multiple ways to generate the result by applying algorithms and data models, but the reliability of the data will determine the value that data can drive. The epicenter that data exhibits can erupt or crash in absence of reliable data. Hence, it is important to understand that data needs to be taken care of and investigated as well before putting it to use. Every sphere of our lives is determined by data and keeping it clean, complete, and accurate will go a long way in determining the value it creates. The different spheres of the world where data is valuable is attributed to the data not going in as a garbage, but as a rough diamond which gets converted into a glittering diamond after playing around with it. Data is playing a very important role by being at the epicenter and we should realise how it has a 360° influence in our lives.
1. Home: You can sit comfortably in the home by changing the temperature of your air conditioner, speed of your fan or temperature of the heater. Data association of the temperature number with actual weather conditions at that temperature help design these devices to provide the comfort we long for. It is very trivial to notice, but a 24° air conditioner is like how 24° feels outside. This is possible by associating the fan and gas in an air conditioner to a similar environment based on data.
2. Entertainment: You are bored and want to watch some interesting TV series or movie. Netflix uses data that you have provided by signing up and browsing earlier to give you recommendations to spend your cooling off time watching a show or movie that you would never have discovered yourself. Data Science is at its best behavior in the entertainment sphere as it leverages the clean data to provide recommendations by applying models and predicting the recommendations.
3. Supply-Demand: The supply demand conundrum is everlasting. The introduction of data at the epicenter to determine every decision is ow leading to a situation where the supply demand conundrum in terms of extreme inaccuracies in forecast could be solved. The core concept of data engineers, extract, load, and transform coupled with core data science is now helping identify the historical trends and make predictions of demand which a manual demand planner would struggle to make. The high accuracy is an icing on the cake as the daily grunts of demand not meeting supply are slowly getting eliminated.
4. Politics: The world’s order is maintained by politics and off late, the high data dependency in the political sphere has led to data influencing polling results and the determining the next leader of a country. Political parties use data (truckloads of data) to analyse and decide the policies and promises to be made in any election. The exit polls are generated based on data insights which give an early indication of the party coming to power. Without data at the forefront of politics, we could have looked at another world war brewing up.
Data is indeed the epicenter of our world, but its utilisation determines the good and bad it can bring. Regulation of data is very important to ensure that there is no misuse of data, and we continue to reap benefits of this oil which is priceless.
