What is Your View on Data Science and Data Analytics? - Infostrux

Mark Cunningham joined Infostrux CEO, Goran Kimovski (Kima) for a live fireside chat. During the discussion, they covered a wide array of topics including the history of Business Intelligence, the Data Analytics industry, and technology trends that shaped and will continue to shape the industry.

Kima: Obviously, there is more data than ever, which is a driver for becoming more data centric and making data-driven decisions. It sounds like today everybody thinks that data science or advanced analytics, or a combination of both, is the answer to the growing problem of data. What’s your view on the state of those two today, and what are your thoughts on the impact of the analytics industry overall to the various businesses today? 

Mark: I’m super excited about what’s to come. There’s a lot of work around AI. I’m looking at start-ups everyday that are doing machine learning and AI, and all these really interesting technologies.

The question we must ask is: are the goals and objectives lined up with the technologies that you actually need and want rather than just thinking you need all this predictive stuff? This is what a lot of enterprises end up doing. I think the tenants of the analytics world (descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive) are valid, there are opportunities in all of those. But we need to first ask what do we want our data to do? Only then we can determine if we really need all those things.

I’m not negative on any of those things, but I do think some of them are still in early stages. For instance, a lot of start-ups are offering AI and machine learning in either an applied analytics world or a pure analytics world. In many cases, when I dig in with the founders, I begin to question why they are telling an AI story when it’s not really AI. Instead, they are just doing basic analytics.

There’s a tendency in our world – both big enterprises and small start-ups are guilty of doing this. It’s sort of like buzzword bingo – everyone feels they need to offer AI or machine learning because that’s what gets the money, and that’s what gets the customers. As a result, you put it in your marketing materials and put it on your website. A lot of those technologies are not even AI and machine learning, they are just analytics that has been around for decades wrapped in the AI and ML packaging.