“How does Data Science enable our business to achieve favorable outcomes Raj?” One of our business executives challenged me once.
I was cursing myself for not keeping an elevator pitch for this. I was going to college to earn a master’s degree in predictive analytics part-time. This company was funding part of my tuition fees.
I had invited him for a meeting to present a business case on this topic. I had used a simple predictive model using Text Mining to look at some content. This meeting was to present the findings. My analytics results showed the model was a good predictor for certain events. He did not accept the invitation.
He was looking at me through the corner of his eye while filling his coffee. I sensed genuine interest.
“Well, Bill” I did not know where to start.
“The businesses were looking for IT to be the enabler for making faster decisions. Data Science could be that silver bullet”
He leaned forward to get the creamer, as I further elaborated.
“Data Science combines fields from math and statistics to its advantage. The motivating factors are parallel processing and reduction in storage costs. More and more software vendors have started investing in big data processing space. But, to be successful, we need data processing capabilities at scale.” I went a little over the board with a business executive.
Our data inflow had quadrupled due to recent acquisitions. I knew that he was in touch with the head of data engineering and also with some software vendors. He was looking to scale our infrastructure to support his growing business needs.
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He took a couple of steps towards me as he stirred his coffee.
I was happy that I did not lose him completely. I changed gears.
“The companies use this field to disrupt industries. Google and Facebook are already using this at scale. They created brand recognition at the highest level. They also own the bulk of the market share of new industries they managed to create with it.
Our business is not far from getting disrupted .” I paused for a moment to check if he was still there.
“Then why aren’t our IT doing this today?” He started walking towards a meeting room. I started walking with him.
I tried to draw his attention to the meeting that I had set up.
“My team had proposed to increase the data science headcounts in our IT department.” Since he seemed not at all interested in taking that bait, I started searching for words to put them in his perspective.
“It’s not that simple. To start with and to be successful, we need to stop thinking that this is an IT initiative”.
He stopped the pace and looked at me with a bit of surprise.
I wasn’t sure if I burnt any bridges by stating that.
“Of course, IT needs to invest to attract the right talents or develop them using our existing resource pool. IT also needs to invest in renovating tools and infrastructure. This is to create an environment where we could start collecting large amounts of data. This will enable us to perform building predictive models using data at scale. For this, IT needs support from business to make that business case”
“It sounds like we are not doing much in this area to protect our business interests. Why don’t you set up a meeting with your boss and me next week when I am in town. ”
He directed me to tell my boss to feel free to include whoever my boss thinks should be in that meeting. He then disappeared behind the closing door.
While I was heading back to my cubicle. I was working on a plan to get my boss up to speed with the turn of events that started at my company’s coffee table.