The Digital Economy and Society (DE) Ministry, TOT and CAT Telecom have been told to jointly create a big data management system to pool all state agency data into a single hub of connectivity.
The move will enable the government to more effectively manage the abundant distributed data of state agencies and optimise data utilisation, which will help ensure the success of the country's transformative roadmap under Thailand 4.0.
Once the state's integrated big data system is fully implemented, corruption is expected to diminish as the public will be able to monitor information about any project through the open data channel.
"The state's integrated big data management system is critically needed for the government, as digital resources are a key component in the digital ecosystem, apart from hard infrastructure development," Deputy Prime Minister Somkid Jatusripitak said yesterday during a speech at the Digital Thailand Big Bang 2017 summit.
"We are not concerned about the private sector, as they always strengthen their competitiveness, as evidenced by collaboration between Sahapat group and Lazada or the Thai retailer Central Group forming an e-commerce joint venture with JD.com," he said. "This reflects the competency of the private sector in using analytics and big data platforms."
Mr Somkid said the big data management system will let all state agencies get interesting and important information faster and at a lower cost compared with traditional practices like conducting surveys.
Additionally, the system will help state agencies create a connected industry ecosystem, helping formulate good economic policy while letting the private sector use the data for investment and strategic business decisions.
Mr Somkid said he proposed to Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha that the government hold a special meeting with representatives of all state units in the country to discuss preparations for the system, with progress on the scheme to be monitored every three or six months.
DE Minister Pichet Durongkaveroj said the big data management system will also help deal with increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats.
He said big data is a term for data sets so large or complex that traditional data processing software is inadequate to deal with them.
Big data systems can help ease digital information management, including storage, analysis, searching, sharing, transfers, visualisations, querying, updating and information privacy.
"A big picture of the big data management system will cover three important parts: classification of state agencies' data centres, the number of big data centres, and what kind of technology to integrate into the existing data centres," Mr Pichet said.
State agencies currently have 300 data centres spanning 36,000 square metres.
The government is in the process of reducing that number to 200 over the next five years to more effectively handle the country's data management systems and eliminate redundant investment and operations among the agencies.
"Big data is a digital resource -- soft infrastructure -- while data centres serve as hard infrastructure that is needed to closely co-develop the Thailand 4.0 development roadmap," Mr Somkid said.
He said the government is considering holding a Digital Thailand Big Data 2018 summit next year to showcase how big data management systems benefit the public and private sectors.