The role of data in the 21st century

- Let's consider the role of data in the 21st century. We know that our increasingly hyper-connected digital world is producing an abundance of data, how much? Let me give you an example. Think about digital pictures. It's estimated we're taking and storing conservatively over 1 trillion pictures a year. If every one of those pictures were printed on four by six-inch pieces of paper and then lined up end to end, they would easily reach the sun and back. 1 Trillion digital pictures produce a lot of data. A more practical example is the data being produced by devices connected to the internet. Consider all the billions of internet of things or IOT devices such as sensors on factory machines and on street lights to detect air quality. In 2020, these IOT devices produced 4.4 zettabytes of data. Zettabyte wasn't even a word that most people had heard of just a few years ago. It's 1,000 exabytes or a thousand thousand petabytes if that's more helpful. Imagine the insights we are learning and will learn from analyzing even a small proportion of this IOT data. Today, data is being created in volume, at high velocity, and with variety. These are the three Vs of what we now call big data. Data alone might not be that exciting, but what it can enable and the answers it can provide are important. It's an increasingly vital to our organizations, to society, and ultimately, to each of us. Let's look at some examples. Today, data is helping the medical community develop a better disease treatment by using large volumes of disease insight to build better predictive models for individual patients. These techniques already helped some hospitals determine when to discharge a patient in order to lower the possibility of readmission. Data is helping to predict and manage natural disasters by leveraging social media reports of thousands of issues and more to build visualizations of, say, the status of a growing flood. This enables anyone to be able to study on a public website in real time how the flood is progressing. Data is shining a light on corruption and assisting with prevention of financial fraud by aggregating disparate data sources to detect patterns that suggest unusual behavior. In the case of credit card usage, any unusual purchases combined with locations and frequency can quickly raise a red flag. And suggest a credit card number is being used fraudulently. Every day, data is helping organizations grow their businesses by helping to identify and target new customers. They do this by, for example, using data analytics to understand what people are searching for online. Fundamentally, data helps people and organizations to make more informed and timely decisions. More than ever, in our hyper-connected and digital society, data is also providing remarkably detailed insights on the world around us. But to leverage the value of this big data takes investment, tools, and skills. All of the benefits of data cannot be realized if data is poor quality and it's not managed. These are just two of the principle reasons why we need data governance.