Babson College professor Thomas Davenport (Lee Sang-sub/The Korea Herald)
Companies that better analyze today’s soaring amount of data, not those with the ownership, will be the big winners in this era of big data, a global analyst said in Seoul on Thursday.
Korea, in particular, has great potential to lead other countries in data analytics, according to Thomas Davenport, professor at Babson College, who is visiting here to attend the Entrue World 2012 conference.
“It’s a real opportunity to analyze all the mobile phone data that is being accumulated in Korea. The nation could be the laboratory for other countries,” he told The Korea Herald.
The American academic is a world renowned expert in the fields of analytics, business process innovation and knowledge management whose best-selling books include “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning.”
He pointed out, however, that Korean companies are paying less attention to the potential and effectiveness of analytics due to their hierarchical corporate culture.
“The only real obstacle is the hierarchical organization structures that many Korean firms have and their reliance on decision-making based on seniority rather than rational analysis,” he said.
“I want to suggest that analytics be used in a kind of frequent operational decision rather than big strategic decision.”
He also expressed his opinion about future hegemony in data control.
“Most of the big data that companies are analyzing today is widely available. They are public data. The premium depends on the analysis rather than the ownership,” he said.
He added that big data still takes up only five percent of the total analytics industry where studies on smaller data have long dominated, citing difficulties in collecting data due to security and privacy regulations.
In his keynote speech opening Thursday’s conference on the era of big data, he also emphasized the importance of analytics amid its growing demand and supply globally.
He said people are estimated to use five exabytes of data per year with the growing popularity of wireless gadgets and video games as well as social media.
“In the past, we didn’t have tools to analyze but that has all changed. We have big data tools and we have more mangers with big data skills,” he said.
By Lee Ji-yoon (
jylee@heraldcorp.com)