Bill Schmarzo in the House of Lords. |
This morning I attended the Analytics Institute's Inspire Event at the House of Lords in the Bank of Ireland. The main speaker was the entertaining Bill Schmarzo, Global CTO of Hitachi Vantara - known around the world as the "Dean of Big Data". While some of what he told us was similar to a talk he gave at last year's AI Conference, what I was most interested in was the language of data that he used.
Schmarzo first of all referred to Data Science as a "team sport". He wanted us to involve stakeholders, business decisions, and predictions before starting on the architecture and technology of a data solution - "lazy" organisations start at the end. His overall theme was to debunk the "Data is the New Oil" myth. He said "Big Data isn't about Big - it's about Small". He wants us to think about we "might be better predictors of performance" if we identify lots of variables and metrics in our data pursuits. He said that we were "Citizens of Data Science" who should be using Design Thinking to generate "trends, patterns, and relationships" in our data. He also warned us about "orphaned analytics" (data not being re-used), and "data silos" (where data is not shared).
Data is an asset that can be that can be used over and over again - it is therefore not the "new oil", which can only be used once. His final message to us was the "Data is the New Sun"!
Overall, the Inspire Event was worthwhile going to - there were also fascinating insights from Peter Dunne and Colin Kane of Bank of Ireland about the bank's journey to being a data and analytics organization.