How is todays Culture affecting the types of Data we collect?

In todays day and age data is everything, it shapes how we live and how we think. In the last few years the extent that retailers have been keeping data has sky rocketed. Dunnhumby Ltd. is a data mining company that carries out mining and analysis for major companies such as Coca-Cola, BT, and Mars. Using data collected from the transactions they can tell when people are going to be shopping, how they will pay for their items and even how many calories they are eating. In large corporations this has already caught on quite a bit. Paolo Gaudiano is the president and CTO of the tech firm Icosystem in Cambridge. Icosystems software can simulate the workings of any organization by modeling the behaviors and interactions of the employees and allowing the companies to run tests to see how policy changes would affect the flow of the company. What they do first is build a simulation based on conversations that they have with the employees. Then, they run the simulation for a year and look for phenomena such as employee churn. Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from predictive modeling, machine learning, and data mining that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future or otherwise unknown events. Predictive analytics has started to be implement into businesses in different ways. You can look at productivity costs and retention and even align your work place culture with your goals. For example, Brian Kelly (Icosystem senior director of strategy) said that he recently helped a client of his make a system that would assign a score to each employee on their likely hood of staying with the company. The information that was considered was: Demographics, Education and Professional license. These results were used to alert managers of the potential risk of losing a value employee. Companies historically have not acted in a very analytical way because they just didn’t see data as a competitive advantage. This is changing rapidly as more people are realizing that data can give you the edge you need. Vijay Gurbaxani, (director of the Center for Digital Transformation at the University of California Irvine) put it right to a tea on how data shifts culture when he said “the more analytics you do, the more your culture will change. And you have to change your culture to do analytics.” What our culture cares about is efficiency and with new ideas coming out like predictive analytics we are able to become more efficient fast and more effectively.

In the near future I can see data analysis taken to a whole new level. with our computer we are able to compute more information faster each year. Where I would love to see data used the most is to better education and improve health care. I want to see a system that you can input a new disease and run it through a simulation that will output potential cures that can be used and then tested in lab. Another application for education that I think would be a cool idea is developing a system that can find out what type of learner you are at a young age and customize your learning course through out your education to best fit with the people that learn like you and teachers that can teach to you the best. I am very excited to see what the future of data is going to become and all of the changes that it will have on our culture and how our culture will impact the data we collect.

This is a link to a video on Icosystem and how it works and is used in the world.