Cooking up with Data Frameworks

World over we get to experience and sometimes also live the moments with varied types of culture and their unique food philosophy, food builds a bridge between culture and people associated with it. While food as such is a universal necessity, palates formed especially in a diverse country like India, bring in the influences of the socio-cultural way of living, it stimulates the creativity and mastery of fine cuisine that brings families and relationships together. Irrespective of what type of meal is being prepared or, for that matter, the occasion, it forms the central focal point where creativity, art, science, and lineages bond on a single plate.

The versatility of fine cooking, no matter if it's the most simple meal prepared by your mother, wife, or by yourself helps in pressing the right buttons of satisfaction and if by any chance you get to experience scintillating dishes presented by a Michelin star chef is one tangent that you would cherish for years to come. While I've experienced the finest and the most beautiful cuisines in some form or the other around the world, the most satisfying is when you prepare for your loved one where the cooking station is your canvas, where the sense of taste, aroma, texture all juxtapose and is presented in a form where you eat with your eyes first before digging in. 

While the art of cooking food comes by experience; the underlying fact is that it consists of a set process where every step has its unique contribution of building a mesmerizing experience eventually, one side step and you end up looking like a loser when kids give their honest opinion of not liking the food. I've given such feedback to my father and have also received some next-generation feedback being a father, the only difference is that kids these days look the other side and wait for the mother to perform some damage control of the situation.

Cuisines and their cooking are in some form of being called the artistic medium of engaging with your taste buds, I feel the same action plays out well in corporate life. Especially when there is data all over, and there seems to be no method to the madness to drive the creative usage of data in business cases, and use cases, I mean in any shape and size of the organization. 

CRISP, also known as Cross-Industry Standard for data mining and was initially ideated and conceived during the late '90s when the market for data mining was very nascent or non-existent in many industries. It became a part of a European Union-funded project called the ESPRIT initiative in 1997, led by major companies like Teradata, Daimler AG, NCR Corporation, and Integral Solutions Ltd. This group of companies collaborated on organizational experiences with Data. These companies have their own teams on building data warehouse applications and solving operational problems using data either internally or for their customers. This was also the time in the late '90s when most of the technology world chased the Y2K problem. Some or most of you reading this should be aware or have experienced the drill of rewriting code to meet the year 2000 deadline.

Results that came up post several deliberations was a step-by-step process guide on data mining and management, it predominantly has 4 different ways of breaking down data as a process model. The phases where data is generated, used, managed, and processed for a business task, what were the tasks that were performed, what are the specialized types of tasks performed by the user, and for that matter, what are the different types of processes that need to be followed for completion of a task.

These task-oriented processes further abstracted to data that is related to tasks being performed by the user, and this is where CRISP came together like milk and honey to accentuate the true meaning of bringing data and processes together. The process specifically drew parallels on the business domain in which an application is used to create, update, manage and visualize data, look at problem statements and associated technical solutions, what are considerations of data as part of the solution development and finally what tools and platforms can be used to reduce time to market and monetize data. These foundational concepts were best described and applied to the most complex and advanced business problems, which can be replicated even today.

While there are alternates such as the OSEM framework, a taxonomy that rhymes like "AWESOME" that is more centric to a data scientist. It's more induced to obtain data from multiple sources, scrubbing to build on a clean data repository, explore the dataset for basic computation and exploration, modeling on the dimensionality of data and arriving at the implementation technique and finally interpreting the results of experiments and sharing it with leaders in simple words where even a 10-year-old understands the data story.

While the data frameworks are like pasta which comes across like Alfredo or Arabiata or, for that matter, a simple coffee that can be consumed like the Italian styled espresso or getting creative with Turkish coffee or the humble South Indian filter coffee, these dishes or beverages have the same underlying raw ingredient but presented to suit the palate across a multitude of cultures. It's up to enterprises to select, build and execute the organization in a data-driven culture with available frameworks like CRISP or OSEMN that truly signifies as a data transformation enterprise for the post-pandemic world.

Implementing data framework in small or large enterprise houses needs to be considered the way Japanese food is prepared, its precision art and science, and has a reputation that at times is intimidating with specialized knives that are used to derive some great dishes. Chicken teriyaki or the regular Shushi is old school, being there for a tea ceremony or trying out the fugu dish will definitely give you a blissful high.  

While I get to contemplate and share inputs on what can be served for breakfast the next day, the magic of learning the process of preparing food and managing data is one profound thought that I leave you thinking about the potential it carries for the future. As the saying goes, the way to a person's heart is through food. I would say the way to a customer's mind is through data. Bon Appetit! Meshia Gare!