5: Shailendra Kumar: What's the problem?

Nov 20, 2018

​Shailendra Kumar is the author of Making Money out of data. It's not an analytics book, it's a business book.

Shaily is a keynote speaker on data analytics. In this podcast he talks about the "everyone does analytics" phenomenon, the importance of articulating the business problem before anything else, and what makes a real data scientist.

Here's a summary:

• How he prospers in a world where "everyone does analytics"
• Analytics as a business or strategic function, not an IT function
• the importance of creating the need first
• What problem are you solving?
• no one thinks about the problem - you need to articulate a business problem. Tell me in plain English the business problem, devoid of technical terms
• what if the client doesn't have a business problem?
• how much money will the business problem save when the problem is fixed?
• people tend to mix up analytics, data science, pattern recognition, machine learning, AI, predictive.
• sales people throw buzzwords around and they don't know what's underpinning it - it's important that they use the right terminology, or they'll deliver things which aren't the thing you've sold in; and then the client blames the function
• with 23 million Australians and 250,000 people on linked in saying they do data science - is that true? there are really only 20 people who can really do analytics: someone who was writing SQL has now "become" a data scientist
• skills of a good data analyst: must have stats and problem solving
• analytics is a creative field

Get more at https://consultantsconsultant.com.au/podcast/5-shailendra-kumar/