Information Systems Faculty Member Presents on ‘Big Data and Analytics’

Assistant Professor of Information Systems Ghazwan Hassna, Ph.D., was invited as a featured speaker on Thursday, Nov. 12, to give a talk entitled “Big Data, The Oil of the New Digital Economy” to the Rotary Club of Metropolitan Honolulu.

Business organizations face a dramatic explosion of structured and unstructured data generated every second inside and outside their boundaries, whether from the firms’ internal transactions or the customers’ interactions with public social media platforms. For every 60 seconds, consider the following 2019 statistics: more than 1 million users logged in to Facebook, 4.5 million videos were watched on YouTube, 390,000 Apps were downloaded, 347,222 Instagram were scrolled, 87,000 people Tweeted on Twitter, 188 Million emails were sent, and 3.8 Million search queries were submitted on Google.

Hassna demonstrated Big Data and Analytics’s growth, becoming the most important resource to create business value, change the competition landscape, and shape the new digital economy. He emphasized that the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil but data. Data is the new raw material that the digital economy is increasingly building on to create value for societies, businesses, and democracies.

Hassna also explained the evolution of the discipline, highlighting the existing Big Data and Analytics skills gap and the different job roles required today by companies. He concluded by giving some recommendations on bridging this skill gap by providing Data literacy to everyone, designing new data-focused educational programs, developing competencies and skills, initiating data labs, and following a top-down capacity-building approach inside organizations. 

Rotary Club of Metropolitan Honolulu organized the Nov. 12 virtual meeting on Zoom, and more than 50 participants attended. 

Rotary is a global network of 1.2 million neighbors, friends, leaders, and problem-solvers who see a world where people unite and take action to create lasting change – across the globe. To learn more about the club, click here.

To learn more about professor Hassna, click here. For the fall 2020 term, he is teaching IS6041 Business Analytics for Big Data Revolution, IS6281 Data Mining for Big Data Analytics, and IS6006 Information Systems Management.