Aneesh Chopra: Leveraging Data for Improved Productivity

I'm going to share with you a graphic that was presented by McKinsey, maybe three or four, maybe now, two months ago. Two or three months ago. And it looked at the American economy and it identified the fact that productivity growth highly correlates with GDP growth. That is sectors of the US Economy that can deliver productivity gains will actually help us achieve an overall economic growth position. What this graph shows you, though is that few sectors of the U.S. economy have accounted for a disproportionate share of our productivity growth. And it's the sectors that, you know, computers and the like that have achieved Moore's Law consistently and other sectors that have incorporated the kind of pressures that is the story of productivity. But I circled three on this graphic that have been either flat to negative on productivity. Government as a sector, health care as a sector, and education as a sector together accounting for 20% of the nation's GDP. If we are to achieve the long term economic growth prospects, we will have to do so by unlocking these hidden opportunities for productivity gains. And one insight as to how one achieves productivity gains in a sector is in an MIT study that was published even earlier than that this year, looking at how firms in an industry outperform each other and incorporates the notion that data, data driven organizations, data driven decision making allows those firms to be much more productive. In fact, they found that companies that are instrumented actually can achieve 5 to 6% productivity gains. So one of the themes in this question about wireless infrastructure is also a theme around liberating information so we can instrument sectors of the economy.