Enhancing Capacity to Govern through Big Data

Abstract

Most South Asian countries tend to treat Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as a onetime adoption. Their institutions which govern the advancement of technology are relatively slower as compared to their neighborhood East Asian and Pacific countries. South Asian countries have spent a hefty sum on e-governance projects and invested heavily in ICT infrastructures. They have been fast to adopt ICTs and create cyber cities to expand business and marketing hubs so much so that ICT applications have brought a ‗data tsunami‘. It is here that these countries suffer a phenomenal lack of trained personnel for reordering data and finding in it a key to growth. If governments do not simultaneously generate capacity to reorder, select and classify this uncontrollable flow of data, the most likely consequence would be derailment of GDP promotion efforts. South Asian countries need skilled personnel to analyze this almost arbitrary and wild communicational parameters of social media, marketing and commercial sites. Data needs to be analyzed, grafted and cleaned before it is stored in ICT storage spaces within each country. In terms of traditional public administration this is equivalent to storing file-information systematically in accordance to its subject, relevance and priority, subsequently discarding the waste unmindfully stuffed in office cupboards and storehouses. South Asian ICT infrastructure is likely to become an office which has unclassified and unmarked files littered all over its spaces to an extent that it becomes too overwhelming and gargantuan for managers to seek any information out of it. Most institutions such as legislatures, Judiciary and Election Commission to name a few encounter extreme challenges in their achievement graph.