Oracle Middle East and Africa’s senior vice president of technology, Abdul Rahman Al Thehaiban, explains why skilled human beings are needed alongside machines in order to extract the maximum value from raw data.
As a raw material with a recognised value, data is often likened to gold. Just as explorers earlier crossed continents in search of gold, many companies today spare no expense in collecting as much data as possible to inform their decision-making. Like gold, data has a market value even in an uncertain economy. Just as gold must be mined and processed to be crafted into items of even greater value, data must be collected, collated and analysed to provide businesses with valuable insights from their ‘digital gold’.
People are crucial at every stage of the analytical process. Without people, the value of the large volume of data that machines create cannot be unlocked. A goldsmith can double or treble the value of gold by turning it into a ring. Similarly, skilled people can turn data into insights, applications or whole business models with incredible value. To succeed in a data-driven economy, businesses need visionaries to imagine and explore the value within their data. They need inspirational thinkers to plan a path to unlock that value, and they need technical minds and problem solvers to harness the full power of technology to connect and mine data for insights.
Plans to unlock the value of data must not underestimate the role people play alongside machines. Every business needs to find the right balance of each – a golden ratio where the right people are working with the right data and tools to deliver maximum value.
This story is from the January 2018 edition of CNME.
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This story is from the January 2018 edition of CNME.
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