Mounim Aouami

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We have all witnessed injustice in our lives before. Whether it is receiving a ticket for parking 30 seconds before your time was up, or talking to an unhelpful and rude customer service agent, life is sometimes harsh and some people sometimes get away with certain injustices. However, with the emergence of big data, there is some light that these injustices can be stopped.
Let’s take a look at big data for a second. Big data allows us to collect all kinds of information; from tracking workers on GPS, voice recognition technology, and even information from emails and phone messages. This means that companies today can track their employees’ every action and decision and hold them responsible for it. Information from GPS tracker tells a company of its employee’s location. Big Data can analyze this information and recognize specific patterns. Take a traffic warden for example. If Big Data shows that the warden stops at a specific place and time constantly, it will immediately reveal their predatory intentions. This would make an appeal for a ticket much easier and justice would be served. Furthermore, we can expect that a traffic warden will be forced to fix his behavior as he knows that his every move and decision is being watched and open to analysis.
Similarly voice recognition technology has also improved justice in the customer service sector. Voice recognition allows companies to track the quality of the calls that their agents make. Big data can further improve this by tracking every word and setting it against the satisfaction metrics of the agent. Thus would motivate the agent to be much more helpful during a call. Who knows, one day big data might also be able to track the tone of the agent. Just like voice recognition, Big Data can also track an employee’s emails and messages. By analyzing the content of the messages, big data can help companies track their employees that make fake promises or employees that do not comply with company rules and such.
However, as Big Data can be used to fix certain injustices, many ethical and moral questions could be raised. One main one question is: should justice be brought at the cost of our freedom?

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In 2012, Harvard Business Review labeled Data Science as “the sexiest job of the 21^st century”. In that article, the authors explained that there will be a shortage of data scientists in the upcoming years. Due to this there will be a high demand for data scientists, who are professionals that can deal with big data. Furthermore, it is only until recent years did most companies start realizing the benefits of dealing with big data and thus there was a sudden appearance and demand for data scientists in the business field. It is true those data scientists always existed and were mostly employed by start-ups. However, today with the mainstreaming of Big Data, we have seen a significant decline in the proportion of data scientists employed by startups. The figure declined from 29% in 2014 to 14% in 2015 as data science became adopted by all organizations in all industries.

A better question to ask is what does it mean for managers who can’t deal with Big Data? Well this means that managers need to start focusing on attracting the best talents around the world. This would be especially challenging as the talent pool is fairly fresh and small. Furthermore, managers could also use formal or on-the-job training to develop their own employees and give them the analytical skills required. However there will still be another challenge to overcome. That is the challenge of turning analytical insights into business actions. This is due to the fact that managers are not necessarily analytical and cannot translate business needs and goals to technical terms. On the other hand, data scientists are too technical and do not have the business background to communicate and translate information into business actions.

As a result of this gap between business and data science, many companies today have started creating new roles and changing their organizational structure. New roles such as chief data officers, chief analytics officer, or chief information officers have emerged to ensure big data can be properly translated into effective business actions. This is why studying Business Information Management will be rewarded later on in your careers as yoy
embark to close the gap between big data and business actions.

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