Yesterday my wife Sheila and I went to a store, as she needed to get a new phone. Browsing through different phones, we finally zeroed in on two that she really liked and seemed to serve her purposes. But we decided to wait and do a bit more research on it. We knew the models, so decided to go back home and check out online for more information and what other people were saying about the phones. We left the store and this morning, I started thinking about that and realized that today, there is so much information available to us that we do not need to go only by a salesperson's pitch any longer. We can go back, find out what hundreds of other people are saying, what the company itself is saying, what is the data on that phone or the product that we are buying.
It truly is the Information Age. We've been about 4 decades into what people are calling the Information Age or the Age of Technology. But I was amazed at how it has revolutionized the things that we do – we are able to make better predictions; we are able to make smarter decisions, more effective interventions.
Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson say, "What were previously areas of gut and intuition, our instincts, today don't necessarily have to be that. We have the data to take it out of those instinctive modes that we used to work with many years ago."
But with all the information that is available at our fingertips, the key must be how we leverage that information. How do we make that information serve us in better, smarter ways so that we make better decisions? Knowledge by itself, as our Scriptures point out, only puffs up. If we have knowledge and keep it to ourselves, it just makes us proud, but it has no value outside of that. Somehow, to be able to take that information and say, "How can it bring about change?" is the key to using good knowledge.
The saying, "You can't manage what you don't measure," attributed to Edward Deming and Peter Drucker, is so true. But what you measure, you've got to manage. Today, there is so much of information out there, that it is causing huge strides in big data and analytics. When you look at some of the changes that are happening with companies! Companies like Amazon are taking out bookstores that are built into locations. Crosswords has a loyalty program which is the only way that they can manage information about the customer – it will tell them possibly, how many times you have come in, the book that you have bought and its genre, the amount of money that you spent. But when you look at all the information that an online retailer like Amazon can track about you, not only does it give them all this information, but also what else you looked at – how you navigated through their site, how much you were influenced by their promotions, their reviews and page layouts, the similarities across individuals and groups. Before long, they develop algorithms to predict what books you will next want to read and then send you emails to that effect. The amount that they can do beyond what a bookstore that is restricted to a place can do, is phenomenal.
When you look at the amount of data that is available, you begin to see that analytics is an area that is so huge and is causing so much interest in the world of economics in the market place. It's a revolution. "Big Data: The Management Revolution" is how Harvard Business Review put it. It is a revolution because what do you do with all of this information that is coming your way. You've got to make it count.
But as I began to look at 'Big Data', two words that are beginning to surface more and more, I wondered, "How different is big data from analytics that we have had for some time now?" In the same article, the writers talk about three differences between 'big data' and 'analytics'. It boils down to 3 vs:
· Volume: The amount of information that is available today is mind-blowing. As of 2012, 2.5 exabytes of data are created each day, and that number is doubling every 40 months or so. You wonder what is an exabyte? We've only heard about gigabytes. An exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes. That's the amount of data that is beginning to be available. The volume is there.
· Velocity: The speed of data! The amount of data is one thing, but the speed at which it comes to you and me is important. For example, Alex "Sandy" Pentland and his group at the MIT Media Lab used location data from mobile phones to infer how many people were in Macy's parking lots on Black Friday – the start of the Christmas shopping season in the United States. This made it possible for them to know how many people were entering. As Terry Leahy would point out in Tesco, they use the information at the entrance to know just from body heat, how many people were coming in, so that they could open more cash counters, so that people don't have to wait in line to check out.
· Variety: There's so much variety of information that is available and it comes from unstructured data that comes from Facebook, emails, text messages, GPS signals from mobile phones, tweets and other social media updates that you and I continuously post. All of this brings a variety of information that comes together to give big data so much more information.
Well, you look at that and you think it is mind-blowing. But how is this taken and used? I was brought back to Bill Gates' speech at the commencement address that he made at Harvard in 2012. He said, "I learnt a lot here at Harvard. New ideas in economics and politics! I got great exposure to many things. But humanities greatest advances are not in its discoveries but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity." That made me think. He goes on to say, "Reducing inequity is the highest human achievement. I left campus knowing little about the young people cheated out of educational opportunities here in this country. I knew nothing about the millions of people living in unspeakable poverty and disease in developing countries. It took me decades to find out. You graduates come to Harvard at a different time. You know more about the world inequities than classes that came before. In your years here, I hope you had a chance to think about how, in this age of accelerating technology, we can finally take on these inequities and we can solve them."
Isn't that important? Even as we look at all this data that is now available to us, how can it be used to further the aims and objectives of our companies? Ultimately, what is it doing to reduce inequities?
Jeff Jedras writes an article, "Six Tips on Winning with Data from the UK grocer that pioneered the Loyalty Card." The loyalty card came by Terry Leahy, Tesco's former CEO. He says at the end, now looking at all the technology that is there, "If you can use research and data to really listen to what's happening out there, you have a chance to respond. And if you do that, you can stay relevant." He talks about relevance in terms of customers. But I'd like us to think about it in terms of ourselves today. How can we use technology so that we can make ourselves relevant to the inequities that are all around us?
I'm always 'haunted' by a line that comes out of our Holy Book at a point where a prophet stands up and tells a young girl that she is in a place of authority and royalty because God intended her to be there because there were inequities that were around her at that time. There was injustice that was being done. He says to her, "Who knows that you haven't attained royalty for such a time as this."
I ask that question to all of us, "Who knows that God hasn't placed us where we are, so that in this age of technology we can begin to harness all this data and use it to reduce the inequities that are around us. That, I believe, is our challenge, to leverage information so that we can leave the world that we came into a little better for our children and our children's children.
Let me pray with you. Almighty God, we ask ourselves this question, "Have you placed us in our positions of authority and power and influence so that we can think even beyond our corporate world, beyond our profits and the things that are expected from us and ask the question – what is it that you expect of us? Why have you placed us in the world at this time? Why have you given us the resources that You have given us? Show us the inequities that we need to do something about and help us to do it. Help us to use this information that we have in a way that we will leave the world a better place than we came into. Help us Master. Give us wisdom. I ask this for all my friends on this call, in the name of Jesus. Amen.
• Andrew McAfee & Eric Brynjolfsson, "Big Data: The Management Revolution. http://hbr.org/2012/10/big-data-the-management-revolution/ar/pr
• "You can't manage what you don't measure," attributed to W. Edward Deming & Peter Drucker.
• Jeff Jedras, "Six Tips on Winning with Data from the UK Grocer that Pioneered the Loyalty Card." http://www.itworldcanada.com/article/six-tips-on-winning-with-data-from-the-uk-grocer-that-pioneered-the-loyalty-card/86151
• Tery Leahy, TESCO's former CEO pioneered the first customer loyalty & discount card.
• One exabyte is equal to one billion gigabytes.
• Alex "Sandy" Pentland and his group at the MIT Media Lab used location data from mobile phones to infer how many people were in Macy's parking lot on Black Friday--the start of the Christmas season in the United States.
• Quoted from Scriptures: Holy Bible, Esther 4:14
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