Big Data:  Fertilizing The Developing Economy

“The digitization of business continues apace, every company is challenged by competitors to manage and understand the massive amounts of data that companies are generating…”

What is “Big Data”?

Exactly what everybody is doing. “Big data is the collection of data sets so large and complex it becomes difficult to process….The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis and visualization…”

In a developing country, what everybody is doing is still unknown…for months, and sometimes years. Growth requires the benefit of knowledge – what works, what doesn’t work, what a market profits by, the risk profile of a newly-employed female driver…. More knowledge made available to more people [and enterprises] enables more, faster growth – just exactly what a developing economy desperately needs.

Only one institution has enough reach to do something about this in real time: The national government. Big data on the state of play of all human behavior in the country represents the Most Important National Asset.

Generally available knowledge creates generally available opportunities.  Valid information must be collected and made available to everyone in order to achieve the broadest growth in all the economy. Everyone must have ready affordable access to this endless river of information.

Equal opportunity to plumb Big Data – to examine in a careful and complete way in order to understand it – generates more economic activity from more sources..faster.

The national government already has many agencies and offices that already touch the people’s lives. Data does NOT direct the people’s lives — it describes what people are doing.  Data that has already been collected must be re-imagined, recorded, digitized, and integrated within a data base that supports information research of all kinds.   New data must be collected to replenish the asset base which will be sold, question by question, over and over.

To retain and grow this assets value, the nation’s Big Data must above all be valid so that its trends, insights, and facts can be acted upon. The best way to validate Big Data is to continue to collect data points so that facts are regularly verified and changes are recognized.

National Big Data will be costly to collect, preserve, digitize, and access. Yet its return on investment will be endless, not only for the government but for the accelerating and diversifying economy. Every question asked of National Big Data generates a fee from the asker. Every question will be asked (and paid for) over and over by a constant stream of new entrants seeking to exploit this newly visible marketplace from their own unique vantage.

In this way National Big Data generates new revenue while spawning new private sector growth and wealth.

No government expenditure is more important than building, expanding, and nurturing a National Big Data resource describing what everybody is doing that can be affordably queried by anyone and everyone.

Q W E R T Y

 

The QWERTY keyboard is the staircase for knowledge.

Once the Learner’s fingers know where the keys are, the eyes digitize information with the hands.

QWERTY becomes the Village’s Magic.

Manual typewriters and paper are provided to each school. These typewriters do not require power, so they can be used immediately to learn QWERTY. Each day the teachers will drill and correct.

All Learners must drill each day. No words are created, only letter groups, until the fingers do the typing without looking.

Every student will learn QWERTY keyboard typing without looking.

This teaches spelling. This teaches punctuation. This teaches grammar.

This provides the most invaluable skill set possible for the future.

QWERTY is the pre-requisite for computers.

QWERTY is the pre-requisite for smartphones.

QWERTY is the pre-requisite for power stations.

QWERTY is the pre-requisite for the village network.

Digitizing Information Monetizes Information

The government can cost effectively generate more revenue resources from digital information that paper records are far too cumbersome and expensive to exploit.

• The Village Work Services contract calls for the exclusive right to automate all information records of government offices within a certain proximity of the village. Ultimately this will include private sector enterprises that generate information that can be added to the BIG DATA information resource that the Host Country government can resell on a continuous basis. Two contracting engineers work with local and regional government offices assigned to the contract to:

o   Design records database

o   Defined a scanned record

o   Define each database record into a no. of 24-field ‘page’ records

o   Process:

• Step 1: 2 engineers can records onto 2-DVD sets – 1 remains with office, 1 becomes working inventory for contractor
• Step 2: Working inventory DVDs returned to village for processing
• Step 3: Each scanned record is converted to digital 24-field page record, populating a data base file by local school students trained to type 45 wpm without errors in English & the local dialect
• Step 4: Data base files are returned at the end of each week to office and integrated into office database by 1 contractor then verified by the other contractor.

The Info automation business case projects the conversion of only five government offices that have accumulated a total of 46,000 records each over the last five years of functioning or about 35 new records per business day. The total charge for scanning and digitizing each record is about $4 per 24-field digital record – resulting in [a.] a fully-functional electronic data base [b.] individually scanned records, as well as [c.] the original paper records.

The info BC’s gross turnover in year two is projected at $267,111, growing to $973,571 by the end of year five. Total revenues paid to villagers amount to $172,934 annually in year 2 and rise to $623,565 in year five. Total GDV revenues paid in year two are $ 68,102, and grow to $231,667 by the end of year five.