Today, the discipline of data excellence is taught at many universities, such as the Fribourg University of Law, at the CNAM (Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers) or the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté in France. It is the science of the dialogue between humans and machines.

The digital world is extremely complex. The Digital Enterprise 4.0 seen by the ISO community visualizes all these complex interactions that people actually have in this new digital world. Given this complexity, the question raises whether there is a way of doing things the old way, with old technology.

The creation of a new society requires to think differently. The question is: are we ready for this? In fact, no one is ready, but do we have a choice? Yes, we have the choice to either jump stupidly or to govern by value.

We are all seeking for value, but what is the meaning of value? In linguistics, value is a polysemy, i.e., a word that has multiple meanings. Value has only two: the one and its opposite. The first meaning is what we can measure (e.g., money, energy), the other meaning is what we cannot measure (e.g., humanity, human rights, policies, rules)—and since the beginning of the world these two meanings walk aside. Both meanings always were separated and we have never linked them together. This is what is causing today’s complexity.

So, how to link these two meanings together? Through data. It is a huge opportunity that will enable us to finally link these two meanings together and to govern by value.

There are many solutions. We are trying to create the future in analyzing the past or the present: Big data analytics, IBM Watson, many technologies are existing in artificial intelligence enabling us to understand the world and trying to project the future for us.

But, what if the world we created is not the world of happiness; i.e., that the rules we will discover out of the existing data will not lead us to happiness, simply because the data of happiness didn’t exist before? We need to acknowledge and to accept that future trends do not necessarily follow past trends. If we need to create a new world, it is with new rules and with new data—we need to act like an octopus. We need to move from the web logic, the spider logic, to the octopus’ logic.

An octopus has 8 brains linked to a huge brain which is the polarizer, the head. The octopus lived its digital revolution millions of years before us. We should not connect data together, we should connect smartness together. Connecting smartness means that the data must be managed at the source, otherwise we will not be able to integrate all this data.

If we are integrating this data in multiple places to create data lakes etc., we are creating symmetries of things: As soon as the data moves from the source, the lifecycle of the source continues while this new thing that we have created is completely decoupled from the lifecycle of the source. It is a common illusion that we can create a data lake and then maximize the value of data. This is not possible.

The final end where the data has to be managed and be smart is the Internet of Things. In some years, there will be so-called data aggregators. They will enable to service this data from the source towards the context of data usage. Because data without context has no sense. In order to make sense out of data, one needs to understand the context of usage—and the context of usage is not at the source but at the destination. This is why the best way to know the data that is required is to get it at the source. Everyone knows best about his or her own person and therefore can provide the most up to date data concerning the own person.

If we want to create a new future, data must be managed at the source—but, who owns the data? This is the question of data ownership. The source of the data must own its data and has to be responsible for it. It is a negotiation to connect people and to do contracts in order to make them sharing their data. Why should people provide their data? Because you can be transparent in the value creation process and can negotiate value for them, so they can share their data on demand. This is the new world—it is connecting smartness.

The data that exist will not necessarily help us create the new future. If we want to create the future, we need to start in the future, i.e., it is the omega before the alpha. We have to start with the omega—the final destination we would like to create, the image of the new society that we would like to create, and then use our intelligence to go there. This can help us in aligning our path with the technology. We have to know our goal in order to get there.