DataLab SBM ITB Director Manahan Siallagan opened the event with the hopes of advancing the knowledge and growing the mindsets of people towards data usage in business and management. Together with expert Bagus Rully Muttaqien, this webinar can provide a perspective on practical data utilization for organizations and so on.

Rully works as Head of Corporate Presales and Digital Communication at PT SOLUSI247, an information technology and communication company that works on large scale data processing and is one of the big data pioneers in Indonesia. He is also academically active as a lecturer in several universities and joins organizations in several associations and communities focused on data. His career as an academic and practitioner for 14 years gave him insight into big data management and its benefits to people's lives.

The digital development and movement in Indonesia is growing rapidly. An example would be the amount of telecommunication operator subscribers that exceeded Indonesia’s population. Internet users have also reached 73.7% more than the total population. The amount and duration of people in internet and social media usage have caused data to become big. The cheapness of increasingly higher capacity data storage devices also caused data on the internet to become larger.

“We needed 3 million US dollars to get 1 GB of storage in the 80s,” Rully explained. “In 2010 it only took 8 cents to get the same storage capacity. The possibility of producing data in the next 3 years is much more than the data produced 20 years ago.”

“To win a war, game, competition, or in this case, a business, we would need data,” he pressed on.

In any agency, business movement requires 4 things: human resources, processes, technology, and of course, data. Data can push present business activities as stored information can help speed up said business agency process. Data can also be searched, extracted, refined, distributed, and utilized to drive economic prosperity. This data undergoes processing that includes collection, preparation, exploration, formatting, and presentation.

In business, big data can save costs in terms of infrastructure, where server usage speeds up the processing of large amounts of data. The hardware used is small, easy to find and accommodates with clear specifications. This data analysis produces accurate and fast decisions or predictions since the data modeling is getting bigger from the collection of input-output applications and big data itself.

Data profiling also transforms data that was initially considered useless into professional and important analysis. For example, plantation businesses such as coffee can implement big data processing to present data on seeding, harvesting, and coffee consumption times. The existence of this information will make other agencies or countries to be more interested in using coffee from Indonesia.

The current data engineering culture recognizes the importance of data at all levels of the organization, and all areas of data need data engineering as an effort of existing data processing. Big data is very complex, and its implementation can be done both with “clean” data, existing talent, and the compute engine used.

"Let's all together try to build Indonesian data talent together, using local applications, and employing local consultants and engineers to achieve national prosperity," said Rully, closing his presentation.

Reporter: Ruth Nathania (Environmental Engineering, 2019)
Translator: Hanna Daniela Ayu (Aerospace Engineering, 2021)