DailyPost 2307
THE DATA CHALLENGED!
It is a mystery professional element. It is an institutional / organizational termite which you would never know of. The challenge would be known only when you have reached the stage of near extinction, with no known way but to meet the final fate. You might get a fair idea of what it really means, if you look into the contraindications. What has been done for data harnessing by the IT behemoths for their commercial gains and in medical / health, security and various applications in the ML / AI will help us understand how data challenged we are. Two indications of this disease are; one that you keep groping in the dark, and second, whatever little is used is primarily at the pie-chart, bar diagram, percentage and proportion level.
There would be nobody in today’s world who would agree to the fact that he is data challenged. With all sorts of data thrown all around, the person gets a feeling that he is either dealing with the world in a very factual, objective or empirical manner or at the very least, is able to provide workable intelligence, based on the data strewn and skewed. If data cannot provide a new dimension or a worthwhile value add, it has no value, and the time spend to work on it worthless. How many of us know *what data is available in your organization and for what purposes?
This mapping has not been done and with the current trends and mindsets in vogue it might take a few decades more. Currently, data is picked up to suit a narrative and there are many of elements who play with it for variety of short-term gains. Instead of narrative deciding the choice of data and that too can be lacking in integrity and honesty, it should be that one strand of data should be able to give you the narrative, the hidden patterns, and what is call workable intelligence. This is the churning which gives you insights sufficient enough to make your organization go topsy turvy in a proactive way.
What a pity, data is treated as zero sum game for an individual, organization or the government. It is neither treated as asset of immense value, of which it has a proven track record. Data has led to unassailable power. The data challenged cannot even think on these lines. The big data mindset as they say has still to emerge in the Indian scenario. We are enjoying on the crumbs of data revolution thrown to us. With the nature of government data available, governance can be transformed in every single way, only if data enablement becomes a tactical government policy. The data tomb with the government is sitting on, can become the kernel of an AI engine for the country, taking us to level different level of precision, we would have never imagined in our lives.
TO EXPLOIT THE DATA REVOLUTION, IT HAS TO START WITH DISMANTLING CHALLENGED DATA MINDSET.
Sanjay Sahay