The vision of globalization has taken a new form, due to major advances in technology. In recent years, growth in imports and exports has stalled throughout the world. However, the forces of globalization are accelerating rapidly.
The flow of digital information is driving the trend. McKinsey’s Digital Globalization: the New Era of Global Flows report found that the flow of digital information across national borders increased 46 times between 2005 and 2014. McKinsey found that over 24 TB of information are transferred between regions every second. This figure is expected to increase another 800% by 2020.
The sheer volume of information transferred across geopolitical barriers isn’t the only milestone that has been breached. The regions that are being connected is equally important. In decades past, the wonders of globalization were only witnessed between neighboring countries and highly developed economies. Digital globalization has allowed all countries throughout the world to forge connections with each other. This has rapidly accelerated the spread of knowledge on every continent.
Unfortunately, digital globalization has its own challenges. Many brands and governments have difficulty determining the integrity of data that is exchanged across regional lines. There are a number of reasons for this. Here are a few of the biggest obstacles.
Language barriers
Advances in big data have unfortunately done little to address the communication barriers between people that speak different languages. If anything, it has exposed the communicational challenges in a whole new way.
These problems can even arise when bilingual translators attempt to decipher information transferred from a foreign region in a different language. Contextual differences between regions speaking the same language can also contribute to the problem. Certain phrases and figures of speech may mean different things to Spanish-speaking people in Spain in Argentina, for example.
As world governments and organizations strive to improve data quality, they must account for language differences in a global economy.
Accounting for non-uniform standards in record keeping and data compliance
Every jurisdiction has its own laws and standards for collecting data. This makes it difficult for organization such as the OECD to make apples to apples comparisons between different countries.
This is a difficult challenge to overcome in our quest to improve data quality. The only ways to address it are:
- Developing a methodology to easily account for regional differences in data. Hadoop-based tools can extract data from various sources across the world and use sophisticated algorithms to equate it.
- Reaching international agreements for countries to find a uniform data collection and retention system.
The second may seem most appropriate, but it may not be logistically feasible. Countries have different levels of urbanization, technological development and demographic diversity. All of these variables could complicate their ability to collect data. Reaching resolutions would also require a tremendous amount of political compromises throughout the world, which would be very difficult.
Using Hadoop solutions to mine data and factor for different data collection methods is the most feasible approach. Fortunately, new data quality solutions are equipped to handle this task.
Meeting compliance standards is especially important for brands employing workers in various countries. Papaya Global states that these companies often depend on data-driven HR solutions.
Authentication defenses against malicious third-party actors
Globalization has exposed nations to hostile state actors, informational terrorists and rogue hackers that frequently use digitalization in concerning ways. The most compelling example was in the 2016 United States Presidential Election. Russian state actors hacked data from the Democrat national convention and shared it with WikiLeaks. This was a deliberate attempt to influence a foreign election.
There other ways that malicious groups can weaponize data. They can also falsify data and misrepresented for nefarious reasons. They may even impersonate legitimate sources within their government.
As more falsified information is uncovered, there will be greater pressure to provide better authentication solutions.