Data, and more specifically using data, shouldn’t be a recent concept, nevertheless it stays an elusive one. It comes with terms like “the web of things” (IoT) and “the cloud,” and regardless of how often those are explained, smart people can still be confused. After which there’s the quantity of data available and the speed with which it is available in. Software is omnipresent. It’s in coffeemakers and watches, gathering data every second. The query becomes how one can take all the brand new technology and reap the benefits of the potential insights and analytics. It’s not a small ask.

“Putting our arms around what digital transformation is may be difficult to do,” says Abel Sanchez. But as the chief director and research director of MIT’s Geospatial Data Center, that’s exactly what he does along with his work in helping industries and executives shift their operations with a purpose to make sense of their data and have the ability to make use of it to assist their bottom lines.

Handling the pace

Data can lead to creating higher business decisions. That’s not a recent or surprising insight, but as Sanchez says, people still are inclined to work off of intuition. A part of the issue is that they don’t know what to do with their available data, and there’s normally plenty of accessible data. A part of that problem is that there’s a lot information being produced from so many sources. As soon as an individual wakes up and activates their phone or starts their automotive, software is running. It’s coming in fast, but since it’s also complex, “it outperforms people,” he says.

For example with Uber, once an individual clicks on the app for a ride, predictive models start firing at the speed of 1 million per second. It’s all with a purpose to optimize the trip, bearing in mind aspects reminiscent of school schedules, roadway conditions, traffic, and a driver’s availability. It’s helpful for the duty, nevertheless it’s something that “no human would have the ability to do,” he says. 

The answer requires a couple of components. One is a recent method to store data. Up to now, the classic was creating the “perfect library,” which was too structured. The response to that was to create a “data lake,” where all the data would go in and someway people would make sense of it. “This also failed,” Sanchez says.

Data storage must be re-imaged, by which a key element is larger accessibility. In most corporations, only 10-20 percent of employees have the access and technical skill to work with the information. The remaining need to undergo a centralized resource and get right into a queue, an inefficient system. The goal, Sanchez says, is to democratize the data by going to a contemporary stack, which might convert what he calls “dormant data” into “lively data.” The result? Higher decisions could possibly be made.

The primary, big step firms have to take is the need to make the change. A part of it’s an investment of cash, nevertheless it’s also an attitude shift. Corporations can have an embedded culture where things have at all times been done a certain way and deviating from that’s resisted since it’s different. But with regards to data, a recent approach is required. Managing and curating the data can now not rest within the hands of 1 person with the institutional memory. It’s impossible. It’s also not practical because firms are losing out on efficiency and productivity, because with technology, “What use to take years to do, now you may do in days,” Sanchez says.

The brand new player

The above exemplifies what’s been involved with coordinating data along 4 intertwined components: IoT, AI, the cloud, and security. The primary two create the data, which then gets stored within the cloud, nevertheless it’s all for naught without robust security. But one relative newcomer has come into the image. It’s blockchain technology, a term that is usually said but still not fully understood, adding further to the confusion.

Sanchez says that information has been handled and arranged a certain way with the World Wide Web. Blockchain is a possibility to be more nimble and productive by offering the possibility to have an accepted identity, currency, and logic that works on a world scale. The holdup has at all times been that there’s never been any agreement on those three components on a world scale. It results in people being shut out, inefficiency, and lost business.

One example, Sanchez says, of blockchain’s potential is with hospitals. In the USA, they’re private and knowledge must be always integrated from doctors, insurance firms, labs, government regulators, and pharmaceutical firms. It results in repeated steps to do something so simple as recognizing a patient’s identity, which frequently can’t be agreed upon. With blockchain, these various entities can create a consortium using open source code with no barriers of access, and it could quickly and simply discover a patient since it arrange an agreement, and with it “remove that level of effort.” It’s an incremental step, but one which may be built upon that reduces cost and risk.

One other example — “the most effective examples,” Sanchez says — is what was done in Indonesia. Many of the rice, corn, and wheat that comes from this area is produced from smallholder farms. For the people making loans, it’s expensive to grasp the danger of cultivating these plots of land. Compounding that’s that these farmers don’t have state-issued identities or credit records, so, “They don’t exist in the fashionable economic sense,” he says. They don’t have access to loans, and banks are losing out on potential good customers.

With this project, blockchain allowed local people to collect information in regards to the farms on their smartphones. Banks could acquire the data and compensate the individuals with tokens, thereby incentivizing the work. The bank would see the creditworthiness of the farms, and farmers could find yourself getting fair loans.

Ultimately, it creates a helpful circle for the banks, farmers, and community, nevertheless it also represents what may be done with digital transformation by allowing businesses to optimize their processes, make higher decisions, and ultimately profit.

“It’s an amazing recent platform,” Sanchez says. “That is the promise.”