The amount of da­ta we pro­duce every day is star­tling.

“All of us, you, me, our fam­i­lies, we are pas­sive­ly gen­er­at­ing da­ta sets every day when we use our smart­phones, when we in­ter­act with web­sites, when you go on your Face­book page, when you pur­chase with your cred­it card, or when you use your loy­al­ty card at the su­per­mar­ket that you might fre­quent,” Ma­ri­na Wal­ters, the Unit­ed Na­tions res­i­dent co-or­di­na­tor for T&T told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian.

“All of this pro­duces da­ta that is com­ing out fre­quent­ly every minute that we speak in very high vol­umes and it is au­to­mat­i­cal­ly cap­tured be­cause this is how those sys­tems are set up and that be­comes the big da­ta be­cause if you take all cus­tomers, all pro­duc­ers to­geth­er that even in a coun­try the size of T&T puts huge da­ta set that be­comes very, very in­ter­est­ing to look at,” Wal­ters said.

The world to­day is more con­nect­ed, in­ter­de­pen­dent and da­ta-rich than at any time in hu­man his­to­ry, Dr Michael Bam­berg­er said.

And Bam­berg­er should know.

He has been in­volved in de­vel­op­ment eval­u­a­tion for over 40 years.

He has stud­ied the po­ten­tial ap­pli­ca­tions of big da­ta and da­ta sci­ence in the eval­u­a­tion of de­vel­op­ment pro­grammes, and has re­searched the rea­sons why eval­u­a­tors have been slow­er than oth­er de­vel­op­ment prac­ti­tion­ers to adopt big da­ta and da­ta sci­ence ap­proach­es.

Bam­berg­er said big da­ta is de­fined as hav­ing a huge vol­ume, gen­er­at­ed very fast and of­ten in re­al time, and is too large to be analysed on a sin­gle com­put­er.

In March Bam­berg­er and Pe­ter York pro­duced a re­port ti­tled Mea­sur­ing re­sults and im­pact in the age of big da­ta: The nexus of eval­u­a­tion, an­a­lyt­ics, and dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy which was sup­port­ed by the Rock­er­feller Foun­da­tion.

“Ex­po­nen­tial growth in the vol­ume of da­ta pro­duced glob­al­ly means that 90 per cent of all the da­ta in ex­is­tence to­day was gen­er­at­ed in just the past two years. An ex­plo­sion of dig­i­tal ser­vices over the past decade has al­lowed many new ac­tors to be­come pro­duc­ers, own­ers, and con­sumers of da­ta. Be­tween 2005 and 2015, the num­ber of in­ter­net users more than tripled—from 1 bil­lion to 3.2 bil­lion—and more house­holds now own mo­bile phones than have ac­cess to elec­tric­i­ty or clean wa­ter (World Bank, 2016),” the re­port stat­ed.

But what ex­act­ly can be done for this coun­try with all this da­ta that is be­ing cre­at­ed?

Well that is the ques­tion that is ex­pect­ed to be an­swered this week dur­ing a two-day fo­rum ti­tled A Smarter Fu­ture: Ex­plor­ing Big Da­ta Op­por­tu­ni­ties for T&T.

The vir­tu­al fo­rum which starts on Tues­day is be­ing or­gan­ised by the Unit­ed Na­tions team in T&T and is ex­pect­ed to bring to­geth­er ex­perts in gov­ern­ment, busi­ness and acad­e­mia “to har­ness the pow­er of Big Da­ta for eco­nom­ic growth and sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment.”

“This big set of da­ta can ba­si­cal­ly help us make bet­ter de­ci­sions as politi­cians, at the Unit­ed Na­tions, busi­ness­es be­cause the avail­abil­i­ty and the analy­sis, and that’s the key of the big da­ta, helps on a glob­al lev­el but al­so on a na­tion­al lev­el to un­der­stand what cit­i­zens do and need,” Wal­ters said.

Wal­ters said she be­lieves that the big da­ta and the an­a­lyt­ics of it can help the coun­try’s de­vel­op­ment and progress of gov­ern­ment and al­so politi­cians to make bet­ter de­ci­sions.

One ex­am­ple of this is the ad­dress­ing of the peren­ni­al prob­lem of traf­fic in this coun­try.

“Imag­ine you take big da­ta an­a­lyt­ics for a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of com­mut­ing needs that is so much eas­i­er than send­ing an eval­u­a­tion team to house­holds,” Wal­ters said.

Wal­ters said da­ta can be col­lat­ed from smart­phones.

“First of all you can use it to make every­day changes but if we col­lect it over months, years as a coun­try and gov­ern­ment you can use big da­ta to shape your trans­porta­tion pol­i­cy,” she said.

Bam­berg­er said the use of big da­ta would help re­duce the time and cost of da­ta col­lec­tion.

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“Many eval­u­a­tors have to spend so much time and ef­fort on the col­lec­tion and analy­sis of da­ta that they have very lit­tle time or lack re­sources to fo­cus on the crit­i­cal el­e­ments of the eval­u­a­tion process.

“Us­ing da­ta sci­ence to free up time will al­low eval­u­a­tors to fo­cus on the ar­eas of da­ta qual­i­ty, en­abling them to spend more time fo­cus­ing on the com­mu­ni­ties be­ing stud­ied, tri­an­gu­la­tion, ground truthing, and mixed meth­ods,” the re­port stat­ed.

Bam­berg­er said the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has caused peo­ple to re­think how to do col­lect and eval­u­ate in­for­ma­tion.

“With the pan­dem­ic col­lect­ing in­for­ma­tion is much more dif­fi­cult so peo­ple are re­al­ly think­ing what in­for­ma­tion do you ac­tu­al­ly need as well as ob­vi­ous­ly the chal­lenges of how do you get this in­for­ma­tion. So COVID is mak­ing every­body fo­cus on how you re­al­ly think through what are the ob­jec­tives of pro­grammes, what are the chal­lenges we are fac­ing and so this is go­ing to be peo­ple will be re­think­ing how you do re­search, eval­u­a­tion and plan­ning,” Bam­berg­er said.

One of the ma­jor ways that da­ta is col­lect­ed is through the use of smart­phones.

Liam Don­nel­ly, the gen­er­al man­ag­er of Dig­i­cel Busi­ness T&T, said users should en­sure they are cog­nisant of how their da­ta can be used.

“I think there is gen­uine con­cern and there are ma­li­cious and de­lib­er­ate groups of peo­ple who try to col­lect per­son­al in­for­ma­tion to use if for mis­cel­la­neous ser­vices but what I think peo­ple need to be aware about when it comes to big da­ta is that any com­pa­ny who is us­ing it the right way will clear­ly out­line how their in­for­ma­tion is tak­en, what they will be us­ing that in­for­ma­tion for and you al­so have the op­tions to ‘opt in’ and ‘opt out’ of pro­vid­ing that in­for­ma­tion, Don­nel­ly stat­ed.

“And I think as con­sumers and users that is what we should be look­ing for so you should nev­er en­ter your in­for­ma­tion in to some­thing un­less you are con­fi­dent you have looked at it or checked what that com­pa­ny or busi­ness is us­ing that in­for­ma­tion for,” he stat­ed.

Don­nel­ly said reg­u­la­tion is crit­i­cal with­in our mar­ket for big da­ta.

“Gov­ern­ment needs to have a strong stance on this about what com­pa­nies can and can­not do, there have to be fines in place when it is found out that it is done for the wrong pur­pose,” Don­nel­ly stat­ed.

Bam­berg said he be­lieves that this coun­try can be­come a big da­ta leader for the Caribbean.

The UN stat­ed that by bring­ing to­geth­er key stake­hold­ers, the two-day fo­rum this week will ex­plore the trans­for­ma­tion­al po­ten­tial of Big Da­ta and look at ways to build and pro­mote trust, col­lab­o­ra­tion and in­no­va­tion across mul­ti­ple sec­tors.

“The fo­rum will il­lus­trate the po­ten­tial for Big Da­ta to add val­ue and re­duce risk across busi­ness, so­cial and eco­nom­ic spheres,” it stat­ed.

At­tor­ney gen­er­al Faris Al-Rawi is ex­pect­ed to de­liv­er the keynote ad­dress.