I attended a data event along with other Heads of Analytics, Chief Data Officers and Senior Data Executives , etc. Here is a summary of some key learnings and takeaways.

Proactive Data Strategy:

• Start with business strategy and align your data strategy to it, it’s the recommended way to set up for success.
• The enablers to long term data strategy wins are data platforms, data literacy and data governance, it’s hard to succeed without any of these foundations in place, so get started as these are marathons not sprints.
• To drive data literacy understand the data user personas in your organisation. Be creative, you will need unique solutions for your organisation to drive data enablement.

Data Democratisation:

• A prerequisite is having a good catalog on available data and easy way to access data within the company.
• Key adoption challenges include non analytical teams not having enough time or knowledge of tools and data to be self reliant. Must be solved by custom training and senior executives buy-in on benefits of self-service.
• Encourage data events like workshops, sessions that encourage more hands-on experiences.

Build/Grow Data Science capability:

• Data scientist roles have broad skills, there is a level of analytical engineering, statistical expertise and analytics story telling required. Hard to find everything in one individual, so build teams with complementary skills and help them grow.
• Business engagement – While building data science solutions, keep the users as part of the journey & let the solution evolve with them rather than going to them with an end product. Iterative feedback loop is the key.
• Data scientists must understand business strategy and directly interact with stakeholders to infer the problem statement and be able to measure and communicate the impact of their solutions in $’s or £’s.
• AI/Data initiatives need to scale and its better to have organisation level initiatives. ROI for certain tools and platforms become feasible only at this level.

General:

• If you have distributed teams, encourage people to come together for project visits , etc., it’s very valuable.
• Communication skills is a top rated must have skill for any analytics professional.

DISCLAIMERS

These are my personal notes and observations and do not reflect any official policy or announcement from any company or views of any employers past and present. All names, products or brands mentioned in the article are property of their respective owners.

Note: Published on my web 2 blog as well