Tiger symbolizes power as evidenced by the business slogan (put a tiger in your tank) trying to in-grain it in consumers brains. Dr. Wordman wishes his readers a Happy New Year of the Tiger with the following greetings (poem): 'Tiger brings you great power Puts wind behind your back Do everything with your plan Success will follow you around or Success will be at your doorstep!'.
New Year symbolizes a new beginning as people and businesses making New Year resolutions and plans. The author has often done that in his younger tear to set personal goals each year. Now personal goals do not seem to be as important as bigger wishes for having a better world for our future generations, even though older folks may not be able to fulfill their wishes in their lifetime. However, this is what differentiates humans from animals and how culture and civilization can be preserved as well as advanced from generation to generation and from year to year. It is not futile for seniors to express their wishes since very often their wishes contain knowledge, experience, wisdom and love.
As a column writer, I read a lot of reports from academia, think tanks and business world. I have written a year-end review on international relation issues for 2021. This column, 'New Year of Tiger and New Wishes for Business and Politics', was triggered by my reading of a McKinsey & Company report (McKinsey Analytics, January 28, 2022), entitled, 'The data-driven enterprise of 2025', which is a good piece of advice to businesses to pay attention to data and how important data is to an enterprise and how to gather, store, manage, distribute and use data for enterprise businesses. It is a natural lead-in to McKinsey consultancy for Chief Data Officers (CDO). The emergence of CDO and its importance in the business C-suite has been observable in the recent decades. The above 'somewhat self-promoting' McKinsey report is actually quite valuable to the business world and its leaders. What I have come away from reading the report is that the big data knowledge, technology and application if coupled with Artificial intelligence in an extended vision (far beyond 2025) will be extremely important for politics (of course includes businesses), specifically for democracy, for America and for the world. In the following, a brief review (with analytical comments) of the McKinsey's data-driven enterprise is given so that a data-driven democracy may be described and understood by our political community.
The datagence can enact political reform for the benefit of our future world – a political wish!
The McKinsey report focused on 2025 to imply the need and urgency of 'datagence' (the author coined the word datagence to imply the era of big data intelligence has come from datarization/computerization which was been advanced from datamation/automation earlier eras). Seven characteristics were used by McKinsey to describe a tip of datagence. One, data is needed in every decision, interaction and process (No one, including children, would argue against this point.) Two, data must be handled, processed and delivered in real-time (With fast speed computing and communication, real-time approaches nano-seconds at device level such as smartphones to within mini-seconds in communication responses.) Third, data must be flexibly stored enabling integration and ready using time series database (Utilizing time-stamped serialized data and database for decision tracking is essential for time analysis and synchronization of time-dependent data actions.) Four, data operating model can enable productization and commercialization of data to realize data value (Data value needs careful definition beyond monetized value.) Five, CDO's role includes extraction of data value and possible revenue generation (AI research on data will be important for many enterprise businesses from internal decision support to external customer services, example, AI product.) Six, Data sharing platform needed to reduce barriers for sharing and supporting a data economy (Data market demands data sharing with data security and privacy protection preventing hacking.) Seven, Data privacy and security as compliance issue will evolve to corporate competency standard (Data backup requirements will be enhanced beyond data recovery to maintain real-time integrity.)
The above anecdote description certainly anticipates a fast-changing business world in the future year – a business wish!
As we are expecting our business world to be 'datagence driven', first, we must examine how the datagence concept may deal with our social economic and political problems, such as crime, homelessness, unemployment, election fraud, government efficiency, etc. The U.S. has been the envy of the world hence taking on the world leadership role promoting democracy – her political system. But we must honestly accept that time has changed; the U.S. has shown a decline not only in economy but also in many domains to a large extent attributable to a fundamental problem – the effectiveness of the U.S. government or American democracy has not only reached its plateau but showing serious cracks. Elections produce unqualified and incompetent officials and decision-making falls in the cracks causing stalemate and obstructions. We must like our business enterprises seek innovation and apply advanced technologies to solve the problems – to find the cracks and the remedy for them.
There is no perfect political system. Wise politicians may find a way to work within the system to change opinions and get compromises. However, human intelligence, life time (term limit) and personal resources are all limited; under the fast and vast data world, humans and their political systems need to apply datagence (like businesses do) to make their political system work efficiently. There are three most critical political characteristics, competent elected officials, wise and correct decision and means for converging support and efficient execution; all these require datagence concept to work successfully. Within the limited space of this column, the author shall describe an imaginary system to prove the 'datagence' point. We may discuss more rigorous details later.
The U.S. can establish a truly independent Resolution and Election Committee (REC) responsible for educating, devising, monitoring and policing all public elections in this country using a datagence model. All legitimate voters are registered with REC and given a dedicated 'datagence enabled' smartphone (voterphone) for political use only (free for voters but with responsibilities to maintain privacy and security. Theft or misuse of voterphone is subject to criminal charge). Every citizen of voting age must vote with protest vote allowed. The voterphone provides education materials about all elections and voting processes including constitution voting rights and responsibility, candidates info, campaign info, and resolution information, voting schedule and procedure, timely public opinion survey results and most importantly time stamped voting results as well as candidate elimination criteria, etc. The voters are required to educate themselves and pass a test to use the voterphone to vote. Time stamped multiple votes are tallied and fed back to voters until the voting passes a true threshold for democracy (say 51%) on any candidate or any issue. This process ensures true effective democracy to be achieved (galvanizing unity effect). The voters are given feedback on every voting result in real-time, all public opinions (expressed by voterphone users) and candidates responses in real-time. The votes are time-stamped based on voters previous voting action. The built-in datagence data analysis has only one purpose that is to make voters understand (get educated) and arrive at a serious and meaningful vote by learning and voting multiple times until the final passing threshold is achieved (no candidate or issue shall be passed by < 51% vote). Our political system has fallen far behind technologies. That is why we have expensive money driven unfair elections with abuses and frauds electing incompetent candidates. Datagence supported voterphone used wisely can improve our political system, voter education level, candidate qualification and competency and most importantly converging and effective voting result can be achieved to make the democracy great again.
This is a political wish of the New Year of Tiger!
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