Rethinking data usage in a post Covid-19 reality

In recent years we have witnessed an evolutionary process in the data world, known as "Advanced Analytics." Compiling figures from scattered internal and external information, used to be the expertise of intelligence agencies, in order to gain new insights and interesting business directions in real time. They were followed by researchers and stakeholders in the healthcare and pharmaceutical field, currently joined by various and diverse business entities striving for growth and improved performance. The organizations’ goal is to leverage the solid information that has accumulated in recent years in order to preserve, improve and create something out of nothing.

With the development of digital media, the internet, and social networks, additional industries have begun to leverage the information available on the web, whether for business purposes, security purposes, or medical purposes. Business organizations invest extensive resources in order to track and identify users’ areas of preference and to maximize the information for generating business values through targeted publications of relevant products and services. Security and military bodies can easily locate future threats by the information available on social networks. And the medical industry is developing life-saving medicines through information cross-referencing and the use of data from patients with similar morbidities. A relevant example of the use of data for the benefit of generating medical knowledge can be seen these days in the cooperation between the multinational pharmaceutical corporation Pfizer Inc. and the Israeli government. Israel was reportedly the first country to receive millions of vaccines from Pfizer in exchange for data on the vaccine’s impact on the population. As far as the American pharmaceutical company is concerned, this is a bonanza as they can now analyze the data of millions of vaccinated people in Israel according to parameters such as age, gender, medical history, etc., how each of them was affected by the vaccine, if at all (side effects, antibodies, etc.)

Furthermore, there is a new trend showing sectors, that until now have barely been using data, such as production, export, and distribution, beginning to invest extensive resources in data science technologies. In addition, the retail sector has increased its use of internal and external data, in order to maximize activity and create further business opportunities.

The pandemic urged almost all sectors to re-evaluate and to integrate the digital and data worlds as one of the key resources in corporate strategy, at the expense of other resources. Most have internalized that the new reality does not allow them to invest in technologies or ordinary moves in order to generate long-term data and that the choice of data is one of the few options that allow an organization to derive information from an existing resource in a reasonable amount of time. I advise everyone to carry out a thought process for a data strategy in the organization. This is a binding need in the new reality and the cost for adjustments required are usually not high.

Asaf Bar is the CEO of Eternity of the Aman Group, wh

Asaf Bar. Photo: Rami Zarnegar

ich provides advanced analytics solutions to organizations in Israel and abroad.