Updated report by the McKinsey Global Institute: “Back in 2011, the McKinsey Global Institute published a report highlighting the transformational potential of big data. Five years later, we remain convinced that this potential has not been overhyped. In fact, we now believe that our 2011 analyses gave only a partial view. The range of applications and opportunities has grown even larger today. The convergence of several technology trends is accelerating progress. The volume of data continues to double every three years as information pours in from digital platforms, wireless sensors, and billions of mobile phones. Data storage capacity has increased, while its cost has plummeted. Data scientists now have unprecedented computing power at their disposal, and they are devising ever more sophisticated algorithms….
There has been uneven progress in capturing value from data and analytics…
- The EU public sector: Our 2011 report analyzed how the European Union’s public sector could use data and analytics to make government services more efficient, reduce fraud and errors in transfer payments, and improve tax collection, potentially achieving some €250 billion worth of annual savings. But only about 10 to 20 percent of this has materialized. Some agencies have moved more interactions online, and many (particularly tax agencies) have introduced pre-filled forms. But across Europe and other advanced economies, adoption and capabilities vary greatly. The complexity of existing systems and the difficulty of attracting scarce analytics talent with public-sector salaries have slowed progress. Despite this, we see even wider potential today for societies to use analytics to make more evidence-based decisions in many aspects of government.
US health care: To date, only 10 to 20 percent of the opportunities we outlined in 2011 have been realized by the US health-care sector. A range of barriers—including a lack of incentives, the difficulty of process and organizational changes, a shortage of technical talent, data-sharing challenges, and regulations—have combined to limit adoption. Within clinical operations, the biggest success has been the shift to electronic medical records, although the vast stores of data they contain have not yet been fully mined. While payers have been slow to capitalize on big data for accounting and pricing, a growing industry now aggregates and synthesizes clinical records, and analytics have taken on new importance in public health surveillance. Many pharmaceutical firms are using analytics in R&D, particularly in streamlining clinical trials. While the health-care sector continues to lag in adoption, there are enormous unrealized opportunities to transform clinical care and deliver personalized medicine… (More)”