3. Creating a Data-Driven Global Society

Data is captured and analyzed for many purposes including supporting decision making. The expansion of data collection and the increasing use of data-driven decision support is creating a data-driven, global political, economic and social environment. This emerging global society is highly interconnected and many people rely on information technology to support decision making. This chapter explores the impacts that have and might occur as decision support technologies improve and continue shaping global society in new directions. Better understanding of the decision support and analytics phenomenon may help predict future societal changes and consequences. The goal of this analysis is to formulate hypotheses about the impact of decision support for further testing and speculate about long-run consequences. The increasing volume, velocity and variety of data is important to building new decision support functionality. Data collection expansion is part of a self-reinforcing decision support cycle that results in collecting more data, doing more analyses, and providing more and hopefully better decision support. Overall, nine hypotheses are proposed and briefly explored. More research is needed to test and verify them, but anecdotal evidence indicates analytics, business intelligence and decision support are creating a global society that is a data centric, real-time, decision-oriented socio-economic system. Data and decision scientists and technologists should anticipate and ponder the consequences of creating a more pervasive, data-driven global society.