Managing big data in a complex economy

An international Internet exhibition in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. Enterprises using big data analysis can have a 5 to 6 percentage point over their competitors in productivity and profit. Wang Luxian / for China Daily

How does one run a rapidly changing society? How does one manage an increasingly complex economy - with the world's largest crowd of daily commuters, longest service length of high-speed railways, largest variety of means of road transportation and, perhaps, the most unruly bunch of drivers?

The inevitable way to go, scientists point out, is for government offices and their private-sector partners to learn to manage things by using technology to process immense real-time data, something known as big data.

As Robin Li, 46-year-old chairman of Baidu Inc, China's largest search engine, told his audience at the latest meeting of the government's advisory body of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the Internet is a good opportunity for the country, as a result of which many previously impossible things are made thinkable and doable.

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The Internet is the carrier of big data. Through it, an enormous amount of interesting and potentially useful data is generated on a daily basis, giving outlines of the various behaviors of the world's largest online population (591 million in June 2013).

For example, society's interest in the so-called two sessions, or annual gatherings of the National People's Congress and the CPPCC, rose from 19,668 on March 1 to 102,997 on March 3 as measured by Baidu's search interest index.

In a regional breakdown, Beijing is way ahead of other places, followed by Guangdong province as No 2, Shanghai as No 6, Tianjin as No 12 and Chongqing as No 23 within the nation. On a more down-to-earth level, the search engine shows Internet users in Zhejiang and Guangdong provinces most value "sexiness" (xinggan), of which 22 percent are women, while those in Beijing and Jiangsu province most value overall "attractiveness" (meili), of which 37 percent are women.

These data are not only fun to learn about. They are a resource of a new kind, a virtual gold mine, as it were, and can help smart users make a huge difference once they are put to a rational use.

A study by McKinsey & Co Ltd stated that open data have potential to not only enable the government to provide a better service to the public but also to release great social and economic value. A paper by the company's Michael Chui, Diana Farrell and Steve Van Kuiken said open data, or data available in open sources on the Internet, can provide more than $3 trillion in combined value for seven major industries, including education, transportation, consumer goods, electricity, oil and gas, health care and consumer finance.

Enterprises using big data analysis can, according to McKinsey authors Stefan Biesdorf, David Court and Paul Willmott, have a 5 to 6 percentage point over their competitors in productivity and profit.

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