Going back to basics

I’m going to start by saying that by most people’s standards, I’m not an expert with 30 years’ experience in data science, but I have been in the “reporting” world for almost 20 years. Over the past few years I have really focused on the excitement that is “Big Data” and “Data Science”, going back to school at the University of Toronto, and even held a position within a Chief Data Office. All of this has helped me to build a fantastic network of contacts, friends, and like-minded analytics experts, where more often than not, a similar topic keeps coming up.

So many organizations have embarked on this future of Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and they all seem to forget about the base fundamentals. Companies are boasting about their advance capabilities that there building, hiring lots of PHD’s and Data Scientists and shouting “look at how advanced we are becoming”, when they can’t even select and implement the proper tools, data stores, or analytics platforms. Defining what “Data Quality” even looks like for the organization, or how about properly mapping a business glossary to the metadata?

I really could rant on about the lack of fundamentals that seem to get overlooked by so many organizations going down this journey, but it’s the stuff we all see in the industry already. Some companies are doing quite well with advanced analytics, and those are the ones who focused on building a strong foundation before jumping to the advanced part of it all. This concept is as old as time itself…I mean it’s even in the Bible people, Matthew 7:24-27, in case you’re not religious… :)

If you don’t have the foundations built around your analytics practice, you will not be successful, and it’s only a matter of time before the rain comes (and it will), and washes away your advanced analytics practice and theory. All of the AI stuff is cool, fancy, and such a hot topic, but if you don’t have established KPI’s, a sufficient platform, the right tools, developers, metadata, quality metrics, data sources, and most importantly the right people…your better off doing some simple reporting, and build off of that!

Small wins with analytics is the key, build off of your success, and make that your foundation!

Thank you for reading my little rant, and hopefully it will help some people look at there own road map for analytics success.

John Maschke