Can You Teach the Elephant to Dance? AKA

Abstract

In the past 20 years, the practical examples of KDD/data mining have become so ubiquitous that it's almost impossible to imagine a new venture that isn't based on data science. Uber, Facebook, 23andMe, Tesla -- they aren't just technology companies; they are data companies. And yet the reality is that these companies are still anomalies. Large, successful companies usually still treat KDD as either an afterthought or as an experiment. It's not core to how they run the business. As practitioners we compound this problem by concentrating our efforts on valuable business problems; but ones which are usually on the periphery of the business. We do this because changing the heart of how a company operates requires more than just process or technology changes. It requires cultural changes. And these cultural changes usually trigger corporate antibodies adverse to anything new. This talk will review some practical realities of instituting data-driven decisions in a very large multi-national company.