In the 2014 best seller, "The Second Machine Age," Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee argue that this information era will leverage software-driven machines to substitute and replace humans. At the center of that debate is the question of data and how powerful it can become. After all, the more that machines can know and learn, the more intelligent they will become.
Throughout the industrial revolution over a century ago, industrious people found ways to make new and more valuable jobs as labor-heavy duties were replaced by machines. The same is happening in today’s economy. A key development has been to better organize data to serve human demands, commonly known as smart data.
So what does this mean for companies that want to evolve with the times and leverage smart data? Matiss Ansviesulis, CEO of Creamfinance -- Europe’s fastest growing Fintech Company -- recently gave me a rundown on how smart data will manipulate the future of big data:
Smart Data will push the methodology of big data. You can see it in the already apparent obsolescence of social media data sets.
“Using information from social media, on which big data supporters rely, can bring negative consequences due to personal data leakage, which the customer may not be fully aware of,” explains Ansviesulis.
Companies that use the big data approach collect a variety of personal data from social platforms. Thus, in the case of data loss, huge volumes of customer data can be made public. Far from being hypothetical, this scenario has played out time and again in recent years and is a compelling reason to approach data acquisition differently.
Collecting a ton of unstructured data has zero value. Collecting structured, smart data is extremely valuable because it follows patterns and creates predictability. In other words, big data aggregates information, smart data creates data points for decision-making.
It is not just about looking at terabytes of info; it is about making it useful.
“Smart data is actionable data that is available real-time and is actionable. When I say actionable, I mean a couple of different things, such as data accessibility, quality, accuracy, liquidity, and organization. With rapidly changing business dynamics and decisions, availability of real-life data is crucial, as it translates into smooth decision making for the Company and a rapid service for the customer,” says Ansviesulis.
