Building digital equity in communities and workplaces with data democratization

As a self-confessed digital native living in an era where data is a valuable resource that fuels growth and innovation, everything is a tap away with our 5G-enabled smartphones, so much so that we often take this privilege for granted.

Our region is a technological force to be reckoned with. In Japan, “Hinotori” – the country’s first domestically produced surgical robot – entered the robotics surgery market that foreign companies have nearly monopolized. This advancement is available at 31 medical facilities and has helped 900 patients.  Just a month ago, a team of scientists from India developed a low-energy-consuming, high-speed technology with brain-like computing capabilities. This invention can provide new material to fuel semiconductor technology used in most of today’s chips. In Singapore, the government is exploring more ways to expand capacity in space technology as the country pushes forward with its Smart City initiatives. I have seen corporate and government entities depend on access to data and the internet to eliminate inefficiencies, respond to market changes faster, make better decisions and ultimately improve their bottom lines.  

However, the reality remains that only 44% of the Asia Pacific’s population has access to the Internet, according to the latest Mobile Economy Asia Pacific 2022 report, wherein lack of digital skills, affordability and online safety concerns hinder the adoption of the internet in parts of the region, emphasizing the crucial role that data democratization has to play in digital equity.

Despite strong global growth in Internet use, a pocket of the population must be included in the digital age. Digital equity refers to equal access and opportunity to digital tools and online information – for some nations, it is regarded as a natural occurrence. However, it is often not a reality in less developed countries.

With more businesses and governments moving to the web, it has become apparent that the user information utilized to improve existing services and make policy decisions is collected mainly from digitally connected users. The way I see it, this skew in data toward current and frequent users can result in data bias – where one group benefits more than the other. Uneven access to data due to a lack of infrastructure is an issue that affects not only society at large but also organizations.

Digital inequity in society presents opportunity costs in terms of lost data from people who are offline. In the same way, businesses also stand to lose their competitive advantage when data access is limited to a few individuals in the entire organization, as it restricts businesses from using their data optimally.

This relates to democratizing data, a game changer in empowering all individuals, regardless of their technical background, to gain ownership and responsibility to optimize data use within the company.

Data democratization is not just about access to data but also how comfortable an employee is with using and analyzing data. Along with access, organizations must equip employees with an easy way for them to understand the data to use it best to speed up decision-making and uncover opportunities. With a more even distribution of information across all teams, you can eliminate the bottleneck at the data gateway.  But as modern businesses become inundated with data, it becomes imperative for all organization members to use insights we glean from data to improve business performance.

As part of our continuous endeavor to assist customers on their data management path, Dell Technologies has collaborated with Starburst to create a data virtualization solution that eradicates data silos and enables speedy data retrieval from on-premises and cloud-based sources. By utilizing this solution, IT leaders can also determine which data holds the most significance for their organization and should be consolidated. This also allows our analytics customers to deliver flexible and efficient architectures by combining the fastest and most secure query engine and leading hardware platforms for computing and storage.

One of the reasons why data democratization is of growing importance is due to the incredible amount of data being created. As I mentioned in my last article, unstructured data makes up more than 90% of the data created yearly in the Global DataSphere. With this surge in data, unstructured data management becomes crucial to data democratization, as managing data growth helps ensure people access meaningful data. With digital transformation (DX) underway among 90% of enterprises globally, much needs to be done in managing and analyzing the growth in unstructured data.  ALMA Observatory is a doing exactly that as they process large high-quality datasets of observations from space, accelerating science and human progress.

This is where we can rely on modern digital tools and infrastructure, such as AI and Auto Machine Learning (ML) capabilities, to help organizations process and turn unstructured data into usable data. When unstructured data is not managed well, the sheer volume can slow down existing business processes, preventing further scalability and reducing profits. Just as companies can employ the power of AI and Auto ML in fueling data democratization within companies, governments can also harness the power of AI and Auto ML to address the gaps in access to data across society.

Just before 2022 ended, ChatGPT, a tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with a chatbot, blew up the internet and has now reached over 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application to date. How does it work? The bot remembers the thread of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform subsequent responses. It derives its answers from vast volumes of information on the internet.

The tool is available to the public via the OpenAI website, making it accessible to anyone who would like to use it for simple school homework, formal letters and even legal briefs. This is the closest AI/ML tool that allows easy consumption of the outputs we have all been waiting for. I won’t be surprised if ChatGPT (or perhaps another generative AI) is the tool that can deliver, disrupt, and help organizations move toward accurate self-service analytics and data democratization. 

The idea of building digital inclusion – and acknowledging how difficult it is to get the data right – into government artificial intelligence (AI) efforts have become one of the most discussed topics in the data science industry. AI has been proven to boost digital inclusion to create a more connected world. The confluence of computing power and big data enables data scientists and engineers to develop AI solutions to handle increasingly complex problems and help bridge the digital divide.

Through concerted efforts to recognize that more can be done on all levels to encourage digital equity, governments and organizations need to work to reduce the gap between those with access to relevant data resources and those without access. Much of digital equity depends on democratized data so that more can access meaningful data. Countries and organizations should prioritize inclusive technology leadership, allowing everyone to participate in all aspects of digital life actively and fully. That day is not far away.

#unstructureddata #digitalequity #datademocratization #generativeAI #delltechnologies