Today’s ever-evolving world is filled with advancing technologies and game-changing innovations that inspire incumbents, disruptors and start-ups to be more digitally active, especially in the way they conduct businesses. By going digital, businesses can get rid of otherwise tedious and menial tasks that most times block efficiency for both the consumers and the company.

In addition to digitisation, there is another issue that has been gaining popularity, which is one of those game-changing innovations called Big Data Analytics (BDA) that has been made possible for businesses due to them being digitally active.

Dr. Karl Ng, director of the Innovation Capital and Analytics Division for MDEC (now known as Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation) shares what the agency has been doing in regards to BDA.

“Last year, we focused on the overall digital ecosystem in terms of talent pipeline and open innovation. And now that the ecosystem is established, it is time to push for the next step, which is the adoption of BDA for companies in Malaysia and the whole region as well,” he says.

Benefits from BDA

With BDA, businesses have the potential to benefit from the history of consumer behaviour by discovering hidden patterns, correlations and other insights that would allow them to make better marketing decisions, which makes way for better target marketing.

There are three different levels on how BDA can help businesses:

• Descriptive – Descriptive analytics is when the trend of the public’s behaviour is described at a certain point of time.
• Diagnostics – This is when companies analyse the reasoning behind the current trend, figure out what else is missing and predict the future outlook of the market.
• Prescriptive – After the predictions are made, businesses will finally have the opportunity to prescribe certain related items that would further improve the consumers’ experience during that period.

Ng adds: “The data-driven digital ecosystem plays an important part in most organisations, as most business operations are based on data. So this year, we’re going to focus on how to get more companies to adopt BDA. But sadly, the majority of companies and organisations in Malaysia are still in the ‘exploring’ stage.”

He reveals that some of the biggest challenges faced by Malaysian companies on fully adopting BDA are due to the lack of two things: Awareness and understanding of BDA; and trained data analysts and scientists.

“One of our main goals is to ensure that companies truly understand BDA so that they can start focusing on creating a dedicated team within their organisation, like what is happening in the United States, where they actually hire data scientists and officers in their companies,” Ng continues.

He further clarifies that apparently, organisations do not have enough resources to generate data scientists and it is up to agencies like MDEC, the IT industry as well as institutions of higher learnings to instill and encourage interest in the field of BDA.

Creating a pool of talent

Besides adequate training, producing data scientists requires significant changes within the management, in terms of investment for talent training, business operations, as well as infrastructure and technology.

On that topic, Ng opines: “Universities have made tremendous progress, by including data analytics and data science courses in their syllabus. Last year, we only had five local and foreign universities in Malaysia that were on board, but now, the number has grown to more than 10 – which is quite an achievement considering it was done in a short amount of time. Currently, there are now Masters and Bachelors’ degree programmes available.”

Talent-wise, he proudly states that MDEC has made significant progress by developing a combination of face-to-face and online courses, focusing on business data analytics. In 2015 alone, almost 500 people took up the programme, which was the single largest batch thus far, showing that there is a huge amount of interest in the matter.

Meanwhile, Ng talks about a programme based in the US, known as Data Incubator, where people with the right mind and skill sets are nurtured into data scientists within a short period of time.

“Being aware of this, MDEC has successfully brought the programme to Malaysia, run by a local organisation known as the Centre for Applied Data Science. Last year, it managed to graduate 45 data scientists, where most of them were actually sent by their own organisations to be trained into data scientists,” he explains.

In the meantime, MDEC is currently working on bringing together innovative development models and elements, and turning it into a physical lab where some of the latest big data technologies will be showcased.

The centre – ASEAN Data Analytics Exchange (ADAX) – is said to be a proposed collaboration between MDEC and the private sector in order to help put Malaysia on the map.

“It is basically a platform where we have start-ups, academia and businesses solving BDA problems together,” he adds.

Looking ahead, MDEC is planning to continue its efforts to produce more data specialists and scientists in Malaysia, with a target to expand the current number of such specialists from 4,000 to 16,000 and 100 to 1,500 respectively by the year 2020.