As oil deposits deplete, databases bulge

Accurate data — an immensely untapped asset — are often paralleled to oil of the digital economy.

Digital economy has shifted the centre of gravity from oil and gas to data. Businesses that have shifted with the times and embraced data as their bedrock for making decisions are reaping bountifully.

Institutions and individuals with data that others don’t have are more powerful than their peers. Powerful countries invest billions of dollars to gather intelligence so as to stay a notch ahead of their enemies.

Political parties invest millions of dollars in men and material to crunch data that gives them the edge over their competitors. Billion-dollar business behemoths collect, package and sell information.

DIRTY DATA

Because of the high premium placed on data, it behooves organisations to invest heavily to produce high quality data on which to mint information.

A cursory look at many government-run systems for managing the public sector information such as land, health, elections, education and environment reveals a worrisome truth: information systems teeming with dirty data.

Like a pregnancy, dirty data — used as the basis for making decisions — cannot be under the lid for long. As Warren Buffet says, “only after the tides retreat that you get to see those who have been swimming naked”.

Soon enough, the world gets to see the folly of making policies and running politics based on wrong information.

Kids of schoolgoing age but no schools for them; patients in hospitals but no adequate doctors to care for them; cars on thin and dilapidated roads or same piece of land with multiple ownership. Bad data begets bad decisions.

INFORMATION

The lopsided notion that computer information systems can perform magic and sanitise unclean data and yield better information has been proven over and over that it holds no truth: its garbage in, garbage out.

A computer only processes that which it is given and in return, gives us the results we deserve.

Without using the power of data, we are simply darting in the dark. We don’t know the number of children in school nor can we tell how many more schools we need to be constructed, or teachers to train.

Without correct data on the number of patients in the country that require a particular treatment, we can only use gut and guesswork to figure out how much medicine and health workers are required to treat these patients.

In the digital world, there is no room for conjecture or hit-and-miss tactics in making decisions. Only entities that are in accord with changing times have a future in their business.

With time, oil deposits deplete, but information keeps bulging. Data is the new oil: using it strategically fuels business to the top of the heap.

The writer is an informatics specialist. Email: [email protected] @samwambugu2