One of the 2015 RNP Forum’s highlights, which takes place from August 25 to 27 in Brasília, will be the lecture by the Litteris Consulting founding partner and CEO Cezar Taurion. He has over 30 years’ experience in the IT segment, having worked in worldwide companies, and has a diverse formal education, in Economics, master’s degree in Computer Sciences and MBA in Service Marketing. In this year’s event, he will talk about mobility and big data, which have a direct connection, as he explains in the interview below.

What is the connection between mobility and big data?

Mobility is currently a part of our day-to-day lives. Smartphones are another member of our body, and this process is accelerated. iPhone was created in 2007 and it is already a part of our routine. It is a smartphone with the computational capacity of an entire data center in 1969, when man reached the moon. It has applications whose great value is the data integration capacity. Waze’s value, for example, is the quantity of people who feed information into the network. The value of a vehicle booking application is the algorithm, which is able to automatically identify the car that is the closest to the user. There is almost a natural alignment between the information availability propitiated by the mobility and the entire data analysis in the back end, which is the big data. Therefore, they complement each other.

Does this large volume of data change the business rules?

Nowadays, we can create a company with no physical apparatus. Uber, for example, a company that connects drivers and passengers through a cell phone app, already has a market value of US$ 40 billion, which causes it to have equal standing with the largest North American air transportation companies. Airbnb, a website that allows communication between tourists and property owners, shook the traditional accommodation systems, because it has a capacity that is greater than that of any hotel chain. Another example is Amazon, and its recommendation algorithm. The more the system knows you, the better able it is to make recommendations, increasing the sales. These businesses are possible thanks to the great possibility of crossing different possibilities and analyzing data. That is, it is possible to create markets that are totally different from the ones that existed before. We are going through a digital transformation and the core of it is the technology that is in our hands, with a rear end data analysis capacity.

How can the teaching and research institutions benefit from such technological evolution?

It is necessary to rethink teaching. We have a generation that has real-time access to information, and the traditional model is lagging behind. It is not customized, nor interactive. Why do we not explore technology further, turning the teacher into a facilitator of said process? Another idea is to create interaction mechanisms by means of games. In the traditional education, the mistake is punitive. In the game, for its turn, it is part of the learning process. That is, the technology can create an adaptive and customized learning process. We have to prepare our society for the 21st century. If the Brazilian universities do not prepare themselves for a more competitive world, we will lose ground and continue to be a commodity exporter country. It is as if we were playing in a B-series team.

What does the ‘big data as a business’ concept mean?

This is about discovering that information is value. The data are important for the knowledge society, just as oil is important for the industrial society. They must be analyzed and note that there is plenty of information that could be important for other companies. If I am a telephony company, even if I maintain the confidentiality, I have data on the movements of people in certain times, which is relevant for the gastronomy segment, for example. It is a sort of “infonomics”. The information is so valuable that, in the future, it will be included in the corporations’ financial balance.

Could the academic segment also benefit, if it adopted this new outlook, of ‘big data as a business’?

If I am able to better understand my students, I am able to provide a one-of-a-kind teaching. Besides, it is possible to create business and generate funds for the university itself based on the student body’s knowledge. That could generate greater efficiency. We must be efficient in all segments, because inefficiency has a very high cost.