Big ideas for big data

Big ideas for big dataData is the new oil, and property companies must find it, mine it and refine it to position themselves in a world where analytics can upend entire industries.”The world we live in today is all about data – using and connecting data to understand humans, movement and behaviour to create experiences,” futurist Chris Riddell told the audience at the Green Cities conference last week.The problems of tomorrow will provide information solutions, and data is the “new oil” Riddell said. “We need to find it, mine it and refine it.”Industries are already being disrupted by big data enthusiasts, Riddell said. Google started the driverless car race, he argued, because mobility may be a mechanical problem, but “it has an information solution”.”We are moving from a world full of data to a data-driven world,” digital disruptor Catherine Caruana-McManus said.Caruana-McManus has launched a series of successful internet businesses over the years, including whitepages.com.au, and only recently stepped down from her role as director for IBM’s smart cities business in Australia.She says the Internet of Things (IoT) – the ability of ‘things’ such as buildings to connect to the internet – will “transform our lives”.Big data continues to make rapid advances, and organisations now have treasure troves of raw data at their fingertips. When combined with powerful analytics tools, they can gain insights that can drive organisational efficiencies, fuel innovation and create new market opportunities.The sheer volume of data continues to double every three years. Data storage capacity has expanded astronomically and costs have fallen. Data miners are devising complex algorithms on increasingly powerful computers.But this presents problems for an industry that is “lousy” when it comes to data quality, handling and interoperability relative to other industries peers, said Chris Pyke, chief strategy officer for Aclima, a technology company using environmental sensing tools to promote health and wellbeing.”Collate data like you care,” was Pyke’s advice. The property industry needs to get better at managing the old data sources, as well as the new, he said.Colette Munro, AECOM’s chief digital officer said the problem with data is that it “shows some inconvenient truths” – whether that’s buses running 60 per cent empty or buildings missing the mark on energy efficiency. Caruana-McManus argued that it would only be when we were prepared to “let the data stream live” that we’ll begin to “understand the patterns and bring out the truths in the data”.In later sessions, Rick Fedrizzi, chairman and CEO of the International Well Building Institute, argued that data on human productivity and health would drive insurance and financial companies to change their investment strategies. Dr Samantha Hall, director of Rate My Health, warned that personal environmental monitoring devices would “disrupt” the property industry, as people start thinking about the impact their building has on human health. In the future, designers, planners, architects and engineers will become “hypothesis generators”, Pyke said, who will test the robustness of their ideas on rich veins of big data.Riddell offered a word of caution. “Information now flows faster than ever before in history,” he said. Pointing to DNA profiling, which can now tell people the diseases they are likely to inherit with a simple swab test sourced from the internet, Riddell said human beings were not ready to process the level of data – and our industries and institutions aren’t ready either.