05: Shailendra Kumar: What’s the problem?

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

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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.

What problem are you solving?

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
• 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

Team as family

• This is important: you need to work with an analytics in the way you work with your family, like you work with your 8 year old – i treat them very personally, i am their elder brother, i’m making them do stuff because they’re part of my family, and they are doing it because they are part of the wider family. emotional investment will only come if you treat them as a family
• what makes me tick is to find a problem and solve that problem
• Why he doesn’t read, but he does dream, walk and think outside the box
• if you do what you’ve always done you’ll get what you’ve always gotten
• in IT you need to get the plumbing right and if you do everything works. with analytics you sometimes need to break the plumbing and then put it back together
• you need to be creative, know what to look for in the data, be great at statistics, and you should be great at presenting

References

• Here is Shailendra Kumar’s Linked in profile
• favourite charity Ronald McDonald House, World Vision