Here is the new article written by our Director and Co-Founder Javier Orús Lacort for the Economy and Business section of the Heraldo de Aragón, published on January 17, 2021.
We hope you like it!
We reproduce here the published text:
Monday morning on your way to work. You keep thinking about an important decision you have to make this week and you are not sure which of the alternatives will be the best. This situation has happened to all of us. How many times we have to make decisions and we are not sure that we are making the right ones. How many times we ask ourselves this question. Infinite, for sure.
Normally, the passage of time ends up explaining whether you made the right decision or not. The uncertainty you had then becomes clearer after a few weeks, months, or maybe even years, but then you can no longer go back and change that decision, for better or for worse.
Our acquired skills, developed competencies and accumulated experience make us increasingly effective and efficient decision-makers, but even so, we often miss a large part of the information necessary for this decision-making process. And it escapes us not because we do not know the terrain well, but simply because we are unable to take in all the complexity that may be involved in some decisions today. Our intuition is key at this point, it helps us enormously, but it can also play a trick on us. Certainly, we do not have to decide only taking into account what we believe, but considering what we really know, which is the information gathered in objective data that can be useful for us to make that decision.
And if there is one thing we have in abundance nowadays, it is data. Behind the digital transformation we are undergoing, what we mainly have is data. Data accumulated over decades by multiple computer systems, but which is currently growing exponentially with every passing minute. And not only are they growing in volume, but also in variety and speed: currently, in addition to classic structured data (mainly transactional), it is completely common to have digital data in unstructured formats, such as videos, photographs, audio, text, etc., generated and multiplied at great speed as well.
The exploitation of this entire universe of structured and unstructured data is becoming increasingly important, both for society and for companies, and this is where advanced data analytics based on Artificial Intelligence and Big Data techniques play a key role: converting this sea of data into relevant information that allows decisions to be made. It has long been said that data is the oil of the 21st century, but oil in itself does not bring us much. It really does when it is refined and converted into fuel for our vehicles. The same thing happens with data: once it has been processed and refined with these advanced analytics, we obtain the information that is useful for making decisions.
These techniques can not only be used to describe what has happened so far, but can also be used to anticipate what is going to happen. Undoubtedly, descriptive data analytics already provides a lot of information that until now could go unnoticed, but if we can also anticipate future situations, then we can make decisions in advance, before the events occur, or what is the same, minimizing the uncertainty inherent in the decision. The big difference between descriptive analytics and predictive analytics is precisely a temporal concept: descriptive analytics analyzes data to explain what has happened, while predictive analytics analyzes the same data to anticipate with high precision what is going to happen.
And these Artificial Intelligence and Big Data techniques serve both to facilitate decisions for each of us, the people, and to make business processes in our companies much more efficient, in any of their areas or fields of action. Any business process can be improved and optimized with the data it generates, which is increasingly rich and abundant.
Thus, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data help us make better decisions at many levels, supported by advanced data analytics that allow us to minimize future uncertainty. Therefore, when we ask ourselves whether we are making the right decision or not, we will have the answer in the data.
