The development of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and their assistance in digital trans-formation is essential to build a knowledge-based economy and achieving the Qatar National Vision 2030. Data and big data analytics is considered as the centerpiece for SMEs’ digital transformation as it enables companies to discover new possibilities for added value to the customers with better products and services, said an official during a forum.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Tech-nology (MCIT) in collaboration with UN-ESCWA organised its digital forum entitled ‘Big Data: How can SMEs benefit from big data, best practices, policies & show cases’ which shared the main concepts of big data, its challenges and potential socio-economic impact.
The forum dis-cussed best regional and inter-national practices on developing data policies and the ESCWA readiness assessment framework for this technology.Dr. Yazen Al Safi, Advisor for Digital Industry Development at MCIT in Qatar said: “In addition to being the backbone of our economy the SMEs constitute the key to ensure economic growth and fostering innovation. Hence, in the digital age adopting transformational technology is becoming a necessity for this sector to alleviate its contribution to the economy with cost opti-misation and job creation of new and better specialised opportu-nities for our workforce”. He noted that the Ministry’s digital forums in 2021 have focused on the role and benefits of digital transformation and cloud adoption for SMEs in terms of innovating business models, optimising their cost and adding agility to their operations.
“Data is the foundation of every system and yet they create societal or economic added value. However, we can maximise their value after combing them into information and knowledge with the means of enrichment and contextualisation. Thus, data and big data analytics is considered as the centerpiece for SMEs’ digital transformation, since combining and analysing the enterprise data with other sources will enable SMEs to dis-cover many new possibilities for added value to the customers with better products and services,” Al Safi added.
Dr. Haidar Fraihat, Leader of the ESCWA Cluster on Sta-tistics, Information Society and Technology at UN-ESCWA reit-erated that the event came through a series of activities and outputs which reflect Qatar’s path towards digital transformation.
He noted that the UN is uti-lising big and open data in its operations, as well as relocating their knowledge to the cloud. He added: “Large, micro SMEs should be utilising big data because we have more and more big data phenomena and mining tools. We have new computer codes, algorithms, languages that are specialised in mining big data for the benefit of everybody including SMEs. This becomes more important at the time of COVID-19 when small and micro businesses are moving to homes, so tapping into regular sources of big and open data is paramount for their profitability and survival. The SMEs need to look at the new normal with a weapon they can utilise called ICTs and technology in general”.
Dr. Mohamad Nawar Al Awa, Regional Advisor on Technology for Development at UN-ESCWA said: “There has been an expo-nential increase in data size glo-bally, and it is expected to reach 175 zettabytes by 2025. For data analysis tools like AI, machine learning is used to extract the needed information. There are many challenges to improve data quality and the extraction of infor-mation, and also huge challenges related to privacy so that data is not misused,” he said.
Speaking about the global big data market size which is witnessing a huge increase, Al Awa noted that the market size was valued at $70.5bn in 2020 and is projected to grow to $243.4bn by 2027 which is a fourfold increase. “There is a huge opportunity for startups and SMEs in our region to work in big data. Startups working in big data are targeted by big companies for acquisitions which help more to have more job opportunities,” he added.
