Event Information:

• Thu

  05

  Apr

  2018

  APRIL MEETING – Pay no Attention to the Man behind the Curtain: The Unseen Work behind Data Science

  1-5:00 PM (Registration & snacks 12:30 – 1:00)KU Edwards Campus BEST Building – Room 120 12600 Quivira Road Overland Park, KS 66213

  

  Mark Madsen is the global head of architecture at Teradata / Think Big Analytics, where he is responsible for understanding, forecasting, and defining the analytics landscape and architecture. He was formerly president of Third Nature, where he advised companies on data strategy and technology planning. Mark has designed analysis, data collection, and data management infrastructure for companies worldwide. He focuses on two types of work: the business uses of data, and guiding the construction of data infrastructure to support those uses.

  His presentation will include the following information....

  It seems as if every organization wants to enable analytical-decision making and embed AI into operational processes. What can you do with analytics? It looks like anything is possible. What can you really do? Probably a lot less than you expect. Vendors promise easy-to-use analytics tools and services but they rarely deliver. The products may be easy but the work is still hard. Why is this?

  • Using analytics to solve problems depends on many factors beyond the math: people, processes, the skills of the analyst, the technology used, the data. Technology is the easy part. Deciding what to do and how to do it is more difficult. Despite this, fancy new tools get all the attention and budget.
  • People and data are the truly hard parts. People, because many believe that data is absolute rather than relative, and that analytic models produce an answer rather than a range of answers with varying degrees of truth, accuracy and applicability. Data, because managing data for analytics is a nuanced, detail-oriented and seemingly dull task left to back-office IT.

  If your goal is to build a repeatable analytics capability rather than a one-off analytics project then you will need to address the parts that are rarely mentioned. This talk will explain some of the unseen and little-discussed aspects involved when building and deploying analytics so that you can better understand the work and what you can do to support it.

  DAMA members who have a paid membership from April 2017 through March 2018 may attend at no charge.  Guests are welcome to attend for a $25 fee and can submit payment here.

  Please send your RSVP by March 30th to: rsvp@kcdama.org.

  NOTE:  Please contact Membership@kcdama.org or Treasurer@kcdama.org if you are unclear of the status of your membership.