026 - Why Tom Davenport Gives a 2 out of 10 Score To the Data Science and Analytics Industry for Value Creation

Tom Davenport has literally written the book on analytics. Actually, several of them, to be precise. Over the course of his career, Tom has established himself as the authority on analytics and how their role in the modern organization has evolved in recent years. Tom is a distinguished professor at Babson College, a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a senior advisor at Deloitte Analytics. The discussion was timely as Tom had just written an article about a financial services company that had trained its employees on human-centered design so that they could ensure any use of AI would be customer-driven and valuable. "If you survey organizations and ask them, 'Does your company have a data-driven culture?' they almost always say no. Surveys even show a kind of negative movement over recent years in that regard. And it's because nobody really addresses that issue. They only address the technology side." Eventually, I think some fraction of [AI and analytics solutions] get used and are moderately effective, but there is not nearly enough focus on this. A lot of analytics people think their job is to create models, and whether anybody uses it or not is not their responsibility…We don't have enough people who make it their jobs to do that sort of thing. I think we need this new specialist, like a data ethnographer, who could sort of understand much more how people interact with data and applications, and how many ways they get screwed up.--Tom I don't know how you inculcate it or teach it in schools, but I think we all need curiosity about how technology can make us work more effectively. It clearly takes some investment, and time, and effort to do it.-- TD Wealth's goal was to get [its employees] to experientially understand what data, analytics, technology, and AI are all about, and then to think a lot about how it related to their customers.