Emerging Technologies, Big Data, & Corporations use of data

Here are a decent series of videos talking about data analytics at businesses from IBM emerging technologies gurus. I don’t particularly care for IBM stuff (more for cost issues and lack of clarity than the actual tools they have) but I really like the discussion of how to use / mine the data at a company.

This second video is critical for businesses to understand! My feeling is the vast majority of marketing professionals working in businesses don’t have a clue of what to really do with the data and insights the data scientist provides them! (Their interpretation and plans of action often scares me!) I'm not pointing the finger at them because typically I don't have a clue of how their business works!

The second video talks about “dynamic dashboards” which brings up a good point that, while we need to have some dashboards that are static, we also need to be able to have some where we customize them as we interact with businesses.

Many people think analyzing data is a one-time thing. Or that the data scientist does it's work on their own. To do it right, the data scientist needs to work closely with the businesses to understand the relationships they find (or perhaps conduct primary research among customers to uncover what is really happening) so they can go back and further refine their algorithms and look for additional patterns.

In short- Data science is not a one-time thing that is done on it's own. It is an iterative process which requires both intimate knowledge of the business, clear knowledge of the data, and how to actually apply statistics for solving the defined business goals.