You cannot talk about the data economy without talking about the generation of data and its storage, particularly where the data is located (data sovereignty and residency issues), how you exchange data as a utility, data governance framework to protect data abuse and data privacy issues, connectivity which is foundational to the generation and exchange of data and, identity management to build trust on a personal or corporate level.
The government of Ghana is currently working on deploying Big Data across government to rationalize the collection, processing, storing and sharing of data among government agencies. This is expected to be the next major jump in our journey to completely digitize our economy.
Big Data is expected to come with the needed data analytics platform which will help make proper sense of all the data being mined across government. It will also help government track trends across the ecosystem, make projections based on data modelling techniques that will be critical for decision making across the spectrum.
Big Data architecture also takes into consideration the data generated and stored within the private sector to ensure that there is seamless sharing of data across both private and public sectors.
The Big Data regime is expected to bring transparency and efficiency in the way data is utilized. The built-in artificial intelligence component will ensure real time update of the different models for different stakeholders.
Government will then be able to make policy decision based on data science and communicate effectively to citizens who would have access to the same data.
This should improve on the trust relationship between government and citizenry.
One of the most important outlooks of this initiative is the real and accurate information to the business community from the staples of government.
The business community can make targeted investments in critical, high growth sectors of the economy where return on investment is high to enable economic growth.