Can Japan make use of Big Data?

“Big Data” may be a buzzword, but there can be no mistake that this represents the next generation in the digital age. By showing market trends and predicting changes in industrial environments, it has the power to change business, medicine and government.

 I’d like to concentrate on the possibilities of “infrastructure” and “individual.” First, in terms of infrastructure, big data can be used to analyze mobile phone traffic to estimate population distribution and to use that information to plan for disasters and city planning. Big Data itself becomes an important part of the social infrastructure.

Much as the US created the internet out of fear of nuclear war, Japan, as a country that experienced a large-scale natural disaster and caused global concern during the nuclear disaster that followed, has a responsibility to create a next-generation disaster preparedness infrastructure. This might not involve creating a new communications network; rather it would mean creating a higher layer by utilizing big data for city planning.

“Smart Cities” have been conceived as cities that use a variety of sensors and share that data M2M (machine-to-machine). Japan is a little bit behind in this idea, but shouldn’t we be a leader in this area?　According to Shuichi Inada’s “Big Data will Change Business”, Japan uses one quarter of all the sensors in the world. There are sensors everywhere, but they are not used strategically. This should be seen as an opportunity.

Secondly, I’d like to address the “individual.” In addition to businesses and areas, individuals also stand to gain from the collective intelligence. There are many services in Japan who utilize the collective wisdom of their users to compile information, such as Cookpad (recipes), kakaku.com (bargains), and weather reports. It can be said that the Web 2.0 has grown to unheard of levels and is now Web 3.0. The problem in Japan is that the level of use of all of this information is still low.

According to data from McKinsey, North America produced 3500 petabytes of information in 2010. In Europe that number was 2000 petabytes, and in Japan only 400 petabytes. This means that Japan produced 11% as much data as North America. On the other hand, in terms of mobile data, a survey by Cisco Systems revealed that Japan was number one in the world, using over 5 times the world average. Data is being produced and consumed by young users, but that isn’t being adopted by the entire society. Big data is being produced but not used. It seems that the importance of information for the societal economy is not yet recognized.

According to a 2009 white paper ranking the effective use of telecommunications among seven leading industrial nations, Japan was #1 in transportation and logistics but dead last in the field of corporate management. The lack of IT literacy at the management level is a huge problem. How can we make the management class aware of the importance of data? Or perhaps a more important question is, “How can we replace this management class?”