Business Cultures That Will Make or Break Your Big Data Initiatives — Bill Schmarzo on People

Bill Schmarzo is the CTO of EMC's Big Data Consulting Practice and a frequent industry speaker, a blogger, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Management as well as an author. Schmarzo wrote "Big Data MBA: Driving Business Strategies with Data Science" and "Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business".

Show notes at http://hellotechpros.com/bill-schmarzo-people/

Key Takeaways The companies who are successful with Big Data addressed the cultural or people issues. How do we get people engaged in the process so that we're delivering the analytics in a way that is actionable to our stakeholders? Many companies tend to start with implementing Hadoop and then waiting for magic to happen. It doesn't happen. Data science is really identifying the variables and metrics that MIGHT be a better predictor of performance. "Might" is a license to be wrong and in many companies the idea of wrong is bad. In the BI space, the IT departments over promised and under deliveredwhich has lead business leaders to be skeptical of Big Data initiatives. You have to have a tight alignment between the business and IT to ensure that we are working on the right problems. Pick a topic / problem that business users find is important, focus on strategic business initiatives. Create a link between business and data scientists. Create a culture of creativity across the whole organization. Creativity is a contagious event. All ideas are worthy of consideration. We want people to be unafraid to be creative and sharing their ideas even if they may not work. The best ideas come from front line. Most large organizations struggle with protecting their own fiefdoms which leads to data silos. Big Data is not about big, its about small. Learn as much as possible about individual person, event and situation instead of looking at the average of the data. Aggregated data is the devil. You need to work with raw to serve the individual. Big Data initiatives tend to fail because the teams are focused on too many opportunities instead of being focused and priortizing the most important business problems. Focus on one decision which has high value and high feasibility. Big Data is a team sport. We need everyone involved, including the business, the IT and the data scientists. Success breeds success. Quick wins will catch the attention of other people and build a grassroots movement.