Data-driven economy: Analysis, decisions and evolution
Developments in the field of informatics,[1] Since its explosion in the mid-20th century, they are countless, especially thanks to technological development related to electronics and artificial intelligence. At its beginning its center was in the digitization of information so that it could order data (minimum unit of information measurement) and systematize them in an automated way, and then, through databases, obtain information.
Today, times and efforts are no longer focused on digitization, even a large proportion of the population who are digital natives already exist. The best example is that about 90% of the data on the Internet has been created in the last two years,[2] So a couple of years ago we were already familiar with the term Big Data.
All this amount of data, together with the great power of processing it has made our time the age in which the data-driven economy prevails, allowing - from 2010 onwards - the vast majority of industries to base their decisions mainly on automated data analysis, which has led to the evolution from information technology to knowledge management.
The great advantage of making decisions based on data analysis is that it allows us to know in a much more reliable way the final client, being able to predict his or her behavior changes in an almost instant way, allowing them to offer much more specialized products or services, which allows - finally - that it has a greater added value and, ultimately, a greater return on investment.
These tools also improve business operational processes, identifying improvements in productive costs, making it easier to recognize opportunities for the innovation, integration and diversification of each company's business.
The great power of data processing has led to new types of business, based mainly on technological platforms, that gather people, assets and data, thus creating completely new ways of consuming goods and services, being the best exponents of this current companies such as Amazon, Uber, Netflix or Cornershop, who process large amounts of data in order to improve the service they provide. In fact, these many times looked more like technology companies than suppliers of goods or services.
Clearly, the legal industry has not been at the forefront of this process, mainly because the role has been its great ally, taking the weight to the electronic signature just after the COVID, so it is possible to understand that this industry is just in diapers or in the initial phase of digitization, but it will certainly benefit from the great opportunities that automated data management can provide.
One of the most famous cases in the world of how the driven economy allows better knowledge of reality, in this case the judicial, has been the emergence of applications in order to apply machine learning in order to predict court decisions. This has caused a great deal of turmoil in the world, with such solutions being prohibited in France, for example, whose "Justice Reform" of 2019, based on data privacy, prohibited the analysis of sentences based on metadata such as the identity of judges and court judges. In our country, the effort made by our judiciary with the Moral Damage Compensation Baremo is commendable, in which the latest publication, concerning medical responsibility, was prepared with the help of artificial intelligence; a novel fact since the first two records (accidental death and accidents at work) were made without this type of technology.
The journey to manage knowledge requires a great deal of investment and reinvention that starts with the digitization of all processes and, most importantly, the systematization and creation of databases that will enable us to achieve the necessary knowledge for each company and industry; the processing of which will allow us to obtain data crossing information that results; to finally generate knowledge related to the development of the company's turn and, in particular, the final customer.
This level of progress, while astonishing, also proposes a number of challenges specific to our era, especially new forms of partnership and work that have changed and will change our lifestyle in all respects; this includes benefits and dangers such as the use of that knowledge to promote decision-making as wrong as those produced by the fake news.
I personally believe that it is very difficult for legislation to be in place that can solve all the problems that technology creates, since it is creating - day by day - new problems and challenges; it is the duty of technology to offer products and services that are ethical and that allow for the control of data processing in a transparent way, with automated procedures of content control and communication to the holder of the information that it has.
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[1] A set of technical knowledge that deals with the automatic processing of information through computers.
[2] Einstein, Michael, and Michael Einstein. “Some Amazing Statistics about Online Data Creation and Growth Rates.” Information Overload Research Group, 18 Apr. 2019, iorgforum.org/case-study/some-amazing-statistics-about-online-data-creation-and-growth-rates/.