Dataficaction
The Internet has changed the way we live and how we do business. Today we live in an era where everything turns around data. The modern technology makes it much easier to record and analyze everything around us as in a form of quantifiable data. This leads to the appearance of the new technological trend “Big Data”. Big data growth starts with the fact that there is a lot more information floating around us now than ever before. This opens a way to a whole new world of possibilities that businesses can use to their benefit.
Datafication is the newest addition to the data-driven business intelligence practices associated with our recent data revolution. Datafication is a relatively new concept characterized by the interaction between digital and physical objects. It is the term they give to our newfound ability to capture as data many aspects of the world and our lives that have never been quantified before.
There is no official definition for Datafication. Wikipedia defines datafication as:”Datafication is a modern technological trend turning many aspects of our life into computerized data and transforming this information into new forms of value.”
Datafication refers to the collective tools, technologies, and processes used to release the knowledge associated with physical objects by decoupling them from the data associated with them.
About the data
Datafication is an era of big data. It is making sense of the big data in the today’s complex world. The big data main idea is that from a large quantity of information we can learn things that we could not understand when we used only smaller amounts of data.
The relationship between computing and data exists from the beginning of the IT industry when data processing was describing the use of computers to automate the business processes. Over time sophisticated applications were developed to manage the operations and associated data of the companies, including financial transactions apps, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, human resources and more. The data were generally collected in databases and warehouses, and a lot of business intelligence tools were developed to analyze the data and generate reports. These commercial applications dealt mostly with structured information.
The growth of the Internet has taken this to a whole new level. Digital technologies are now present in the economy, society, and our personal lives. Today we create a huge amount of unstructured data in everyday life. This Big Data comes from location data from our mobile devices as we move around in the world, data about the things we are shopping online with our credit card, engaging through social media interactions like sharing, tweeting, posting or commenting, web searches, IoT, smart sensors and more. Big data gives information about our behavioral patterns and personality which creates a lot of new opportunities for monitoring and tracking such data. These data is dark data meaning data which has a lot of valuable information but still invisible to us. Converting dark data into usable and useful data is a challenging task, but today's advancements in data science and analytics and the new IT technologies are enabling new ways of doing this. Data scientist are constantly developing methodologies and architectures for dealing with very large volumes of unstructured data as well as analytical and visualizing techniques, like data mining, for discovering patterns and extracting insights from all that data.
Application areas
Datafication involves collecting data from various sources, storing them in a centralized location, combining them and finding new insights that could highly possible lead to new opportunities. Various data tools, quantitative and qualitative analysis are used to extract insights from the collected data. By analyzing the huge amount of data, data analysts can get an enormous amount of information about people and their behavior.
Datafication can be applied to almost every domain of our living and area of interest.
Datafication can also be applied to our personal lives and behavior. Different technologies are now available that help to monitor and measure things that were previously difficult or impossible to quantify. Everything can now be measured, quantified and compared to other people. Some examples of data we have available now are:
- smart sensors (data for energy, water consumption, air quality and temperature, RFID devices data)
- personal sensors (health sensors, fitness, smart watches)
- online shopping patterns (e-commerce sites, mobile payment)
- check-ins (theaters, concerts, GPS locations, etc)
- streaming videos, movies and TV series (Netflix, YouTube, etc)
- Social networks (Twitter data files our stray thoughts, datafication of our work life by LinkedIn, Facebook datafying our friend's network)
Traditionally, personality is measured by interviews and self-assessment questionnaires through sampling techniques. With datafication, we have the ability to accurately predict personality types and behavior patterns based on personal data. Datafication of personality has the potential to disrupt several industries.
Datafication is starting to enter strongly into business processes of the companies. For companies, the datafication process starts with collecting massive amounts of data from a wide variety of data sources. After proper investigation of the data and extracted valuable information can be used by business for viewing and studying their customer profiles which can lead to increasing their market share, profitability, and brand awareness. Datafication can help companies to understand their customer's sentiments about a product or a brand.
An example of datafication of business processes can be for example identification of customer buying patterns from their location data, social media activities, and previous order details and send exclusive offers. Financial services, for example, are starting to change by the use of micropayments, which are payments that cover small incidental costs paid by mobile phones or another type of contactless payments as an individual moves through town.
The data generated by the datafication process can be used to improve the efficiency, financial performance and overall management of the companies. Beyond its use in improving the efficiency and performance of companies, the data can be applied to significantly improve customer relationships, as well as to create new classes of smart products and services.Datafication, also known as datafy, can be described as a process of turning an existing business into a data-driven business. An organization or company that implements datafication is said to be datafied.
Datafication can be implemented on whole cities in the process of transforming the cities into contemporary smart cities from the future. IT and Internet of Things will be used in different manners that will allow the creation of new data streams in a city space such as transport, energy and water management at a city level, urban planning, smart lighting and more. Citizens are also able to take greater control over their transport choices by having more information about their usual routes, an end-user may be able to know in advance that there is no point in going to the train station, but may instead take a bus or an alternative train line route.
Although still viewed from its technology roots, datafication is slowly broadening to encompass the data infrastructure, applications and best practices required for the effective capture, representation and delivery of data to inform decision-making and action. The lines between enterprise and social intelligence are also becoming increasingly blurred, as action from decision making is oriented at influencing people's behavior.
Conclusion
Datafication and business intelligence are revolutionizing the data around the world in a way we have never seen before. The main financial power of Datafication is the information about people’s behavior as customers, employees, and prospects for new business. It is really turning existing businesses into data backed businesses where analytics play an important role.
Big Data is enabling us to better understand the world and people as well as to add intelligence into every aspect of people’s lives. It’s making it possible to not just better understand what’s happening in the present but to also make more accurate predictions about the future.
The implications of the datafication of companies and our lives are enormous. The Internet of Things which connects ordinary products and devices to the Internet enables all processes within our life to be analyzed. They probably are far more profound than we might expect today and therefore it is very important to start thinking immediately how you can you datafy your business. Datafication is already redefining business and society enabling us to be prepared for a data-driven intelligent society of the future.
Daniel Serafimovik
senior software engineer
originally posted:
http://www.bigbrainintelligence.com/Post/dataficaction
