Almighty Data or Hype? By INDERJITH DAVALUR @INDERDAVALUR
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION AND THE PLACE FOR DATA
Mea Culpa, I am one of those who is guilty of getting on and staying on the Big Data wagon for the wrong reasons. “Data is the new oil” is an oft-repeated phrase. I am about to commit a “virtual” suicide by proclaiming that it is not so. Data has its place and it is not at the top of the digital food chain. I feel that we have crowned the half-naked prince, Emperor in haste.
For the sake of clarity, when I say data, I will be referring to digital data throughout this piece. Data is a by-product of any activity. Therefore, creating data is as natural as breathing. So we have data. A lot of data. So what? Accumulating data, structuring it, storing it, analyzing it are a natural progression from that point onwards. How and what we do with the data is more important. Software.
The magic that is software, to me, is more transfixing. Consider the prospect of a language written in a semantic that is alien to our natural human language. A cryptic command, logic, condition, trigger – anything at all – that is magically read, understood and acted upon by silicon. Hardware that contains baked-in code that can parse and carry out complex instructions at blazing speeds. Pieces of such chips soldered on a board and communicating through ‘roadways’ of circuits laid out on a board. The miracle of hardware coupled with the magic that is software is what gets my adrenalin pumping. How can such a marvel not be exciting?
Even the awesomeness of hardware pales in comparison to software. Hardware is more or less static. It is confined to physical and functional dimensions. Software, however, is supreme. It can use the same hardware (with some limitations of course) and carry out simple tasks, entertain with games, or perform wildly complex calculations at very very high rates of speed, accurately all the time. And it can do this million million times with alacrity. This is just the beginning of what software can do. But wait, there’s more!
Consider intelligence in software. It suddenly becomes a living, breathing, dynamic being. Almost. Software can learn and teach itself. Crunching data and spitting out patterns and actionable analysis suddenly becomes mundane, banal almost pedestrian. No. I am not against data or big data. By itself, big data is just that. A monstrosity. Sometimes, big data actually gets in the way. Misleads us in making decisions quickly. Software breathes life into data.
Take any software language or tool. Examine it. Study its flow, the eloquence, the nuance and its brilliance. Brevity in software coding is revered by programming perfectionists. There is elegance in a well-written piece of code that executes beautifully, perfectly, every time. Anyone that can find literary melody in Shakespeare or Milton can certainly begin to enjoy the harmony in a beautifully crafted software application code. So, my appeal goes out to all those who are worshipping big data to take a moment to reflect upon the joy that software brings to our daily lives. After all, the future is software!
Author
For the sake of clarity, when I say data, I will be referring to digital data throughout this piece. Data is a by-product of any activity. Therefore, creating data is as natural as breathing. So we have data. A lot of data. So what? Accumulating data, structuring it, storing it, analyzing it are a natural progression from that point onwards. How and what we do with the data is more important. Software.
The magic that is software, to me, is more transfixing. Consider the prospect of a language written in a semantic that is alien to our natural human language. A cryptic command, logic, condition, trigger – anything at all – that is magically read, understood and acted upon by silicon. Hardware that contains baked-in code that can parse and carry out complex instructions at blazing speeds. Pieces of such chips soldered on a board and communicating through ‘roadways’ of circuits laid out on a board. The miracle of hardware coupled with the magic that is software is what gets my adrenalin pumping. How can such a marvel not be exciting?
Even the awesomeness of hardware pales in comparison to software. Hardware is more or less static. It is confined to physical and functional dimensions. Software, however, is supreme. It can use the same hardware (with some limitations of course) and carry out simple tasks, entertain with games, or perform wildly complex calculations at very very high rates of speed, accurately all the time. And it can do this million million times with alacrity. This is just the beginning of what software can do. But wait, there’s more!
Consider intelligence in software. It suddenly becomes a living, breathing, dynamic being. Almost. Software can learn and teach itself. Crunching data and spitting out patterns and actionable analysis suddenly becomes mundane, banal almost pedestrian. No. I am not against data or big data. By itself, big data is just that. A monstrosity. Sometimes, big data actually gets in the way. Misleads us in making decisions quickly. Software breathes life into data.
Take any software language or tool. Examine it. Study its flow, the eloquence, the nuance and its brilliance. Brevity in software coding is revered by programming perfectionists. There is elegance in a well-written piece of code that executes beautifully, perfectly, every time. Anyone that can find literary melody in Shakespeare or Milton can certainly begin to enjoy the harmony in a beautifully crafted software application code. So, my appeal goes out to all those who are worshipping big data to take a moment to reflect upon the joy that software brings to our daily lives. After all, the future is software!
Author
Inder Davalur
Inderjith Davalur is a healthcare technology specialist, speaker, writer and utopian dreamer.
Inder works with hospitals committed to transforming the healthcare paradigm with the aid of new innovative technologies. His primary area of interest lies in using data analytics and technologies such as Deep Learning to shift the current physician-driven healthcare model to a patient-driven market dynamic.
Inder focuses on the manifold ways in which data crunching and machine learning can lead to better diagnoses that can not only be made at the time of illness, but predicted way before any symptoms surface. The path ahead in the sector, he believes, lies in the deployment of evolving technologies that immensely influence both diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of healthcare, delivering real patient-driven, data-enabled, informed healthcare.
Inder currently works as the Group CIO at KIMS Hospitals Private Limited, Hyderabad and has previously assumed leadership roles at leading hospitals and companies, in India and the United States of America.
Inder works with hospitals committed to transforming the healthcare paradigm with the aid of new innovative technologies. His primary area of interest lies in using data analytics and technologies such as Deep Learning to shift the current physician-driven healthcare model to a patient-driven market dynamic.
Inder focuses on the manifold ways in which data crunching and machine learning can lead to better diagnoses that can not only be made at the time of illness, but predicted way before any symptoms surface. The path ahead in the sector, he believes, lies in the deployment of evolving technologies that immensely influence both diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of healthcare, delivering real patient-driven, data-enabled, informed healthcare.
Inder currently works as the Group CIO at KIMS Hospitals Private Limited, Hyderabad and has previously assumed leadership roles at leading hospitals and companies, in India and the United States of America.
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