Digital transformation is easy as ABCD

(Nov. 2024) Governments tend to be organized hierarchically at the national, provincial, city, and district levels. Each level has its own plans and goals, its own budgets, and its own IT systems.

That means government data is fragmented. How, then, to obtain a unified view of it?

“You need a list of data owners,” says Seabay Jia, CEO of Audaque Data Technology, a data governance company.

But that’s just the first step in a long journey. Data must also be cleaned.

Data cleaning is the process of fixing inaccurate, incomplete, or redundant data in a system.

“There is a saying, ‘Garbage in, Garbage Out,’” Mr. Jia said. “So, is your data garbage? Data cleansing is very complex work, and that’s a challenging part of data governance.”

In an interview for Transform Talks, Mr. Jia told Huawei Editor-in-Chief Gavin Allen that organizations embarking on a journey of digital transformation must think not only in terms of technologies, tools and platforms, but also about the policies, standards, and methodologies that govern how data is stored and managed.

He actually says it’s as simple as ABCD.

“A stands for Algorithm innovation. Algorithms must be created and customized, and a talent pool created for doing this important work.

“B is for Business scene. You need to develop rich ecosystems and a different kind of business understanding for solving problems, plus domain-specific solutions for each industry sector.

“C stands for the Computing power needed to train the AI models that will play a vital part in the future growth of the digital economy.

“Finally, D is for the data itself. Each country needs a systematic way to get high quality data. This will enable innovation in algorithm on AI and on applications.”