I’m often asked to give invited lectures at universities and topic that people often want to hear about is “How organisations can use advanced analytics (AA) for their competitive advantage?”. In this article I’d like to share the framework that I came up in 2016 and it stood the test of time.
This framework is 5 pillars that every organisation needs to adopt to realise value of data and advanced analytics: strategy, data, technology, people and process. Let me go through each one of them, and provide an intuition with making a road trip example:
-
Strategy - is a strategy where the company is going, its vision and a long term plan. If you are planning a road trip, it is the map and the route that you planning to take
-
Data - is the fuel for the car. We all know importance of data for advanced analytics and the recent advanced in AI show that no matter how good your algorithm and hardware is, it’s the data that is the main driver of progress
-
Technology - is an engine and a car itself. Tech allows us to take the data, process it, extract the insights and suggest actions. In organisations it is usually the end-to-end data architecture (eg. sources-data lake-end user systems and data governance), software and algorithms to process the data and serve the models and security.
-
People - is a car driver. The car will not move or will not get to the end point if the driver doesn’t have relevant skills. In AA organisations, data scientists, data engineers, translators, MLOps engineers and AI product people are the main drivers of value.
-
Process - is a set of rules on how to get to destination, as well as a GPS that constantly tries to find the best route. In AA organisation it is the ways of working (usually Agile), software engineering, MLOPs and data best practices, change management and culture.
This article reflects my personal views and opinions only, which may be different from the companies and employers that I am associated with.