The popularity of Fitbits is one phenomenon that all of us are aware of. What about datafication? Technically, a Fitbit uses exactly this system. It tracks your physical data, like footsteps or heartbeat, and provides you with quantifiable and readable data, like how many calories you have burnt etc. Datafication, hence, has immense applications when it comes to the real world.
Social Media Datafication
Social media has become a beacon for people to share their lives online. However, this data is rigorously collected and put forward as location, tweets, mentions etc, through which there is a network built. This is just one example. Now imagine your work data being taken and quantified from LinkedIn, or your X app data being pulled from how many tweets you write or repost. All of this is quantified and put into numbers easy enough for people to read and draw valuable insights from.
Business Process Datafication
There are two main segments in business process datafication:
- Internet of Things: Everyday objects are now connected to the internet of things to help livestream the data from them to draw veritable conclusions through data. This has a huge scope from smart homes to smart cities.
- Artificial Intelligence: Here, computers are programmed to recognize patterns, predict outcomes, and continuously enhance their efficiency.
Hardware Datafication
To better facilitate internet of things and AI (Artificial Intelligence) datafication, hardware accessibility is immensely required. This means that the devices need to be equipped with sensors, collect data from sources, and need to be optimized to improve data farming facilities. Innovations in hardware, such as more powerful microprocessors and larger, more affordable storage devices (like SSDs and cloud storage), have reduced the cost drastically and increased the efficiency of data storage and processing. Moreover, the devices need to be trained rigorously to harvest, analyze, and create readable data.
Personal Life Datafication
An analysis of personal life means so many inclusions such as online shopping data and the patterns we can derive from them. This includes several crawls through several websites to gain critical shopping analytics to help companies improve their data sets. Along with this, an increasing interest in streaming services also means an immense collection of users of this data. Restaurant booking, hotel check-ins and reviews on the internet also form an important process of datafication of our lives as it provides readable metrics to businesses on what behavior to focus on and what to discourage.
In conclusion, datafication is an important move for businesses to keep them informed about trends in the industry, customer behavior and analytics driven business model. All of these are extremely important to stay relevant in the industry currently, and datafication is making it possible even for small businesses to thrive in this competitive market.
