Pause for a second. Think about your organisation; mentally visualise your processes and perform a quick inventory of all the data which you collect. It might be a scribble on a form or a record in a database. I bet that you have a lot of that. Now think more in-depth about your operations and at all the data which you are not capturing. It might include the list of people that walk into your shop or maybe the location of your delivery vans. I am pretty sure that you can think of loads of uncaptured data.

Did it dawn on you that you are sitting on a pile of digital Gold?

And the worst part of this is that most probably, you are not doing much with your data. You might be generating a report here and there, but that’s pretty much it. Of course, this is a missed opportunity because only by measuring your processes can you manage them efficiently and effectively.

In this day and age, data is considered by many as being the new Gold because it is the primary fuel for our intelligent software. It is highly, pervasive; you can collect it from anywhere, and with the proliferation of digital devices, the availability of information is increasing. Just two years ago, 90% of all the data in the world did not even exist! Because of this, the problems we are facing today are various.

First of all, we are creating large volumes of data daily. Computers, wearables, mobile devices and all sorts of sensors are producing 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. To visualise the scale of this, if we had 2.5 quintillion pennies, we could cover the entire surface of the earth five times! When you generate so much data, the issue shifts on how to manage it, and that is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes into play. The only way to process it is by using AI algorithms capable of digesting large volumes of data, identifying patterns and making sense of it.

As an example, take the manufacturing industry, having hundreds of machines operating at the same time. The amount of data which they produce is enormous. Only an AI is capable of analysing it in real-time, propose prescriptive maintenance, predict future faults and optimise the running of the plant autonomously.

#digital-transformation #artificial-intelligence #knowledge-management #data-science #data #data analysis