Keeping Up With Data — Week 22 Reading List

5 minutes for 5 hours’ worth of reading

Source: https://www.kearney.com/analytics/article/?/a/the-impact-of-analytics-in-2020

Data science is about solving business problems with data and analytics. This has been my mantra for many years. It’s probably a confirmation bias that the articles below are reiterating that. Be it at the level of a company tightly aligning the data strategy to the business strategy. Or individual data scientists being obsessed with solving business problems.

Either way, I hope you’ll find the following articles inspiring. Or thought provoking at least.

• The impact of analytics in 2020: Company’s maturity of analytics operations — how advance their analytics function is — has an impact on company’s profitability. And not a small one. Analytics “Leaders differentiate themselves with a clear strategy, an analytics vision, and a well-defined implementation road map.” And even though they spend just 1.1x more on AI compared to Followers, they get 4x (!) more value out of it. What makes a company a Leader is not just throwing money at the problem. Strategy, leadership, culture, governance, skills, talent and data ecosystem all play a role. (Kearney)
• Good Data Scientist, Bad Data Scientist: I wasn’t sure if the article I saw in Tristan Handy’s newsletter will lead to a philosophical essay or a parallel between data science and a spaghetti western movie. But in fact, it leads to a parable illustrating instructive principles for data scientists. So, what is a good DS? Good DS is obsessed with solving business problems. Good DS understands marginal return on effort. Good DS is a generalist. Good DS gets their hands dirty. (Ian Whitestone)
• Onboarding to a data science team: Data science interviews are not easy. Companies and hiring managers are scrutinising CVs and examining deep statistical, ML and programming knowledge. So, what to do when you actually land the job? How do you get up to speed as quickly as possible? Even when the people who made you sweat over Python operator precedence don’t have an onboarding plan ready for you? Get an onboarding buddy, be a sponge, set up your DS environment and establish yourself. And enjoy! (Lisa Cohen @ DS at MS)

Yesterday was the World Bicycle Day and I haven’t been on a bike the whole week. I hope to change that tomorrow! Happy weekend!

In case you missed the last week’s issue of Keeping up with data

Keeping Up With Data — Week 21 Reading List

Thanks for reading!

Please feel free to share your thoughts or reading tips in the comments.

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