6 Ways To Make Your Company Data-Driven – InformationWeek

Rich Wagner, president and CEO of Prevedere, shares six guidelines he’s developed based on his own experiences seeing good data left to waste at major enterprises, including the Fortune 500 chemical company where he once worked.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.informationweek.com

Leaders are launching Analytics and Big Data projects to help organizational performance. Why? The Economist Intelligence Unit found data-driven companies rate themselves substantially higher in terms of financial success than others do
http://boulderinsight.com/fostering-data-driven-culture/

 

Rich Wagner, President and CEO of Prevedere provides insight how do to take early moves:
Look forward, not backward: Go solve a business problem as “Executives needed to know what was going to happen, not what had already occurred.”
Determine the question: Be clear on what questions are needed to understand or solve the Business Problem “Before searching for answers, it’s critical to know what key questions your data should answer.”
Rethink your data sources: Many familiar initiatives are internal data yet “I have found nearly 85% of a company’s performance is dependent upon external factors” so how do you acquire this info?
Don’t go it alone: Partner with vendors who have solutions.
Automate: If the experiment was a success, optimize to make it available as a real-time system.
Mind your presentation: Make answers “part of an existing process” rather than a new awkward bolt-on.

 

Project Teams can work to manage business disruption by following these guidelines and help their organizations transition into data-driven enterprises.

Intelligent humans in Silicon Valley are keeping a wary eye on artificial intelligence – Silicon Valley Business Journal

Five tech titans — Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft — are forming a group to create a standard of ethics concerning artificial intelligence (AI). They aren’t alone.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.bizjournals.com

Today is Labor Day in the USA. We celebrate it by “not working.”  Worried the robot overlords are coming for your job?  Five tech titans — Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft — are forming a group to create a standard of ethics concerning artificial intelligence (AI.) When us PMs are back to work, we should keep track of these trends and appropriately manage in our Risk Plans. Happy Farewell to Summer!

How the Big Data Explosion Has Changed Decision Making

The Big Data Era balancing act between being open to stakeholder input on Data Governance  and being fast to innovation.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: hbr.org

Intriguing Insights On How the Big Data Has Changed Decision Making 

 

I agree with Michael Schrage’s HBR article that “Organizations I work with increasingly struggle to straddle two painfully polarizing operating principles. On the one hand, they desperately seek greater agility; on the other, they genuinely want to include all the right stakeholders in their processes.”

How does that data get shared (inclusiveness)? And how does the organization effectively take advantage of that data (agility)?”

 

Also he applies this question to “digitalization, data, and analytics. Who has the right to access, process, and share data has become the greatest source of opportunity and contention in the enterprise.

 

This article provides a mobile app case study where product management strategy moved from Innovation to Customer Experience and used Decision Rights to dramatically improve organizational agility.

 

What are Decision Rights?
Schrage work refers to Jensens’ work on the subtle and brilliant insight was that the right to make decisions — not just the ability to perform or be responsible for tasks — is essential to organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently, assigning and allocating decision rights is every bit as organizationally important as defining jobs, roles, and tasks. In that light, decision rights can and should be seen as a managerial mechanism for empowerment. The greater your or your team’s decision rights, the more empowered and accountable you are.  Source: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/decision-rights-who-gives-the-green-light

 

“The RACI framework offers an excellent real-world instantiation of Jensen’s decision rights approach:

  • Responsible. Who is completing the task?
    – Accountable. Who is making decisions and taking actions on the task?
    – Consulted. Who will be communicated with regarding decisions and tasks?
    – Informed. Who will be updated on decisions and actions during the project/process?”

 

This article is a quick read and breaths new application life into the valuable RACI model.

Insights on Analytics Project Management

Big Data Conference Interview

Analytics Conference

Analytics Project Management Interview

Global Big Data Conference is beginning shortly. Pictured below (on the left) is General Keynote Session Speaker Dr. Zhongcai Zhang on The Role Of CAO: A Practitioner’s Perspective (Zhongcai Zhang, Chief Analytics Officer, New York Community Bancorp)

Just had a great conversation with KRS Murthy (pictured on the right), the conference Technical chair, serial entrepreneur and strategic advisor to the new University of California (UC) Merced campus. I asked him on the “State of Analytics Project Management.”

He had several industry observations:
1) Industry is new so Anyone can call themselves Project Management (or fill in the blank) Expert
2) Therefore, organizations launching new Big Data initiatives can fall prey to the Blind Leading the Blind.
3) This is exacerbated by a global university talent shortage

Key Next Steps: Take a holistic approach to data science e.g., strategists, product management, UX/UE, data science and engineering, domain expertise and PROJECT MANAGERS:-) KRS (I took editing liberty to emphasize Project Management – Laughing)

http://globalbigdataconference.com/70/santa-clara/4th-annual-global-big-data-conference/schedule.html