Economy by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images
Happy New Year! And welcome back! While January 1st is just the previous day in time plus one, a lot of folk use this time to reflect on the past year and plan for the year forward. It’s one of the few times we allow ourselves the luxury of thinking beyond the next month, or even week.
Something I got to reflect on — inspired by a conversation with a particularly enlightened colleague — is the “competitive” position of Australia, particularly with regard to China. (The colleague is now visiting Shanghai for the first time).
All economies compete with each other. Smart economies look at countries that are ahead of them, to gauge how they themselves can do better.
It strikes me that China is a smart economy, and here’s why. China has long declared that catching up with more prosperous countries is just table stakes. The real goal is to anticipate the next source of value and become proficient at it.
Science, and the technologies that issue from it, have been a source of value for the last decades. Those countries that become proficient at computers, PCs, internet hardware, and — in a subsequent wave — at software, networking systems, as-a-service delivery, and cloud, delivered enormous value to their citizens.
China aiming to be science leader
China has openly declared that it would like to be a leader in the sciences quite soon. President Xi has called for China to develop into a world science and technology leader.
The question that China’s leaders have been asking — and I feel all country leaders should ask — is: will IT be the thing that my economy needs to focus on, in order to prosper in the coming few decades?
I suggest concentrating on IT, while important, is only going to allow an economy to play catch-up. To really get ahead — to leapfrog the competition — leaders need to place an educated bet on: What Will be Next?
In the case of China, they are also placing bets on the Internet of Things. See this Forbes’ article, which argues: “China is no longer a tech imitator — it has matured into a tech innovator, solidifying its place as an IoT leader”.
I’m going to suggest that another excellent candidate is data. For the purpose of this article, data is the stuff that pours out of these IT systems. Data is not the systems themselves.
The value of data science
The systems are the plumbing, the data is the water. And we are at the very beginning of knowing what data is, how to manipulate, exploit and refine it.
One gauge as to how valuable such knowledge will be is the salaries that good data scientists are beginning to command.
This is an area in which Australia has a very real chance of being a leader; certainly a regional leader, and possibly a world leader.
Full, agile and value-producing exploitation of data requires open-ness. The Web Foundation, which measures performance for the Open Data Barometer, finds that the UK — the global open data leader for many years — has seen its score decline.
And, the only other government to see an absolute reduction in score in this leaders’ group is the USA — another early pioneer that has seen its score fall by 11 point. In the words of The Web Foundation, the US “can no longer be considered an open data champion”.
A few thoughts for what I hope will be a Big New Year!
