Open Tech Calendar

Adding Commercial Value with Analytics and Data Science: Are you selling buckets or mining gold?

Point of the talk: Whether you are running an analytics function, acting as a consultant / contractor or an individual data science professional – chances are you need to be adding commercial value with your analytics. But, just like in the California gold-rush – you can make money (add-value) by panning for gold, or you can make a good living selling buckets and shovels. Too often analytics gets side-tracked into providing models, dashboards, datasets etc. instead of monetizable insights. Why is this and how do you avoid it?

Key points covered:
• The importance of adding value through analytics
• Recognising the distinction of actually uncovering valuable insights (mining gold) versus building tools to help others do that (selling buckets)?
• Why it is so easy to get caught up in the “buckets business”?
• Why can it be dangerous / self-defeating (some war stories)?
• What can you do to ensure you are genuinely “mining for gold”?

Presenter - Nick Hall - www.linkedin.com

For the last 6 years he has led the Barclays Analytics Centre of Excellence – a team of 140+ analytics and data science professionals who use analytics to grow the Barclays retail and business banking franchise as well as build data products derived from the bank’s transactional data.

He started life as a geek, when it was much less cool: pre-web and practically pre-PC. He spent 6 years at IBM and then 16 years as a strategy consultant building and deploying data capabilities for clients in financial services and the consumer goods sector (mainly beer). His focus was on analysing customer-level behaviour data and blending this with research-based insights – to grow revenues, manage for value, manage risk or optimise capital use.

Both his personal and professional interest now is in pursuing his ‘geeky origins’ and helping businesses drive more commercial and strategic value out of their data through the application of data science, AI, human creativity and managing the business decision-making process.