Tips from Top - Seminar on Advanced Analytics by Mr Siddhartha Roy(GM Advanced Analytics & Cognitive Solutions, IBM)
The
morning of 24th September started with a thought provoking session, when Mr. Siddhartha
Roy, General Manager, Advanced Analytics & Cognitive Solutions at IBM,
visited IME Department of IIT Kanpur for a session on Advanced Analytics, Big
Data and recent trends. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur, Mr. Roy started by
defining consulting as a guiding force for thinking right in order to bring out best solution for a set
of defined problems. Talking about ‘data’, he said it has both quantitative and
qualitative parts, and knowing how both of these match is the key to
understanding it.
Mr.
Roy mentioned how every problem or case starts as a nebulous one. To emphasis his point and to impart an approach to students for tackling real life business
problems, he carried out an interesting activity by dividing the students into
groups and presenting them with a problem faced by a certain company having
dipping market share of its products. With the required focus on the
market metrics used to analyse the data, each group presented their approach
towards solving the case. After all the groups presented, Mr. Roy explained about
use of four core metrics in analysis, which was certainly a great insight for
the students.
Diving
into the technicalities, Mr. Roy talked about data analytics being used for
finding relationship between cause and effect which has wide applications in
the field of direct marketing, forecasting, identifying critical influencing
drivers and segmentation. He talked about the tools used for analytics such as
R, SAS, gretl, MS Excel, Hadoop, python, etc.
Mr.
Roy talked about continuum of advanced analytics which includes Descriptive,
Predictive and Prescriptive analytics. Talking about the phenomenal growth of
analytics and its usage in the business world, he mentioned about data
analytics being used in surveys, tapping into transnational data, social media,
and marketing. Mr. Roy further illustrated on how something conventionally
thought of as an unrelated factor can have a huge impact such as weather can
actually affect sales and businesses as a whole.
From
the business point of view, behind all the jargon's, the essence of analytics
boils down to making and saving money. It was interesting to know how big names
like P&G, Amazon, Google, Netflix use data analytics on an extensive scale
to leverage their competitive advantage and base critical decisions on the
results obtained from such studies. Moving into an era of competitive analytics,
Mr. Roy gave examples from the business world of P&G and Walmart using
analytics for supply chain and consumer behavior, MCI using data analytics for
networking and pricing, etc.
Mr Roy, a true expert in the field,
parted with some pearls of wisdom by advising those interested in analytics to
pursue it passionately, as this path can be unforgiving and requires one to
keep learning, keeping the inquisitive child alive and letting the creative juices to flow.
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