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In my past few posts, I’ve discussed topics that managers and business leaders must understand to become conversant with Big Data and take advantage of Big Data in their businesses. I’ve covered topics ranging from challenging the assumptions and habits they have when making decisions to understanding trends for the future in this area and understanding the need and role of executive engagement. After this build up, I’m happy to announce that the big day is now here, and we are launching two new data science and Big Data analytics courses for executives and business leaders. About a year ago, we launched our first data science education offering, Data Science and Big Data Analytics, which was geared to aspiring Data Scientists. That course was developed for people with the requisite technical background who wanted to take the next steps to learn more about machine learning, data mining, in-database analytics and other data science skills. Now we are offering two new courses focused on giving business leaders and their teams the skills and knowledge to implement a Big Data strategy and lead an analytics team to success. The first new course is called Introducing Data Science and Big Data Analytics for Business Transformation and is a 90+ minute Executive Module on Big Data and data science, and the key business benefits of introducing Big Data into an organization. The four main benefits an organization can garner from successfully implementing data science projects are: 1) Financial: recent research shows very high ROI on data science projects, with an average payback of 11 to 1. 2) Decision quality: improved decision quality by using data to drive the right decisions and challenge underlying assumptions. 3) Data quality: data gets better when people actively begin using data in their organizations, discovering anomalies in data that has been previously unused or unexamined. 4) Collaboration: better collaboration due to cross-functional teams needing to work with each other on challenging business problems. This paves the way for better understanding about data problems, and these improved relationships make these projects easier in the future. The second new course is Data Science and Big Data Analytics for Business Transformation. Many companies decide they want to “start doing Big Data,” but don’t know how to start. Or sometimes they appoint someone to be in charge of this new important-sounding initiative, but that person needs a roadmap in order to be successful. Our aim in developing Data Science and Big Data Analytics for Business Transformation is to help these individuals. This one-day course provides case studies, a Data Analytics Lifecycle to guide them on managing projects, overviews of several analytical methods with real-world business examples, and also some understanding of how to use analytics to drive change and innovation. We were fortunate to have Patricia Florissi, EMC’s CTO for Global Sales, join us and provide input on the course development. Here is her perspective on why Big Data matters and why leaders need to learn some of these key points: With these new courses, we now have data science and Big Data analytics courses for people at different levels within the organization and also who may be at different stages in their adoption of Big Data. Executives and others new to Big Data may want to take the new 90+ minute Executive Module; new leaders of data science teams will learn the key points for what they need to know from the one-day course; and aspiring data scientists can take the first steps in their role with the week-long technical course. The launch of these two new courses on business transformation is a good step toward helping people at different levels of the organization be successful with Big Data. Lastly, I wanted to share this video of John Smits, who oversees a Sales Operations & Analytics team at EMC. John talks about how he realigned his team and how he’s taken steps to pragmatically implement data science methods within Sales Operations at EMC. Also, please join me in Las Vegas at EMC World May 6-9, where I will be discussing these issues in more detail in my breakout session, “Building Science Teams” on May 8 from 10-11 am. Hope to see you there. |
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