AFSUG conference presentation on lessons learned founding a data science programme and how it all comes together with a data-driven culture.

1. Data Science
a n u n e x p e c te d j o u r n e y t o t h e
Digital Enterp ris e
J a k e B o u m a A p r i l 2 0 1 7

2. What I’m about
“Open Data Science is not a single technology, but a revolution
within the data science community; an inclusive movement that makes
open source tools for data science - data, analytics and computation -
easily work together as a connected ecosystem.”
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaketbouma
https://github.com/jaketbouma

3. Project Switzerland
( w e ’ r e n e u t r a l l i k e t h a t )
“To develop the business
intelligence engine that enables BLT
to aggregate, process, analyse and
prioritise large sets of customer data
to reveal patterns and trends for
improved customer engagement,
increased revenue and operating
efficiencies”

4. On your marks, get set, data science!?
CEO
Mark Levy
Data Scientist
Jake Bouma
CIO
Andrew Murray

5. The first two months
• Extensive meetings with Business Units to identify opportunities
• The data battle: building relationships and scraping sources together
• Hacking POCs out
<Some preliminary results that I couldn’t share publicly>

6. Value Demonstrated
“Data is the organization’s
most underutilized asset.”
-- Andrew Murray

7. Actually, this is a big data problem

8. To Hadoop or not to Hadoop
This thing is big.
Data science works better on more data.
The most interesting data is messy.
Speed is king.
Performant access to the most granular, rawest form of everything

9. Hadoop has taught us some important lessons
Stop trying to force one tool to do everything.
Scale out works, send the code to the data.
Relational databases are still quite nice.

10. DevOps for big data
DATA
COMPUTE
Build what you need, when you need it
Decouple data from applications
Always be ready to scale

11. 6 Months later: State of the art BDP
* 3 Networks, > 10 different types of server, >20 running servers, cloud native

12. BDP cruising
“There is just too much going
on.”
-- Jake Bouma

13. Agile Methodologies to the Rescue!
Small ideas
Small parts of a big idea
Big Ideas
Fail Fast
Prioritize
and Track
Long Term
Objectives Timescale of quarters
Timescale of weeks

14. Building out a team
“Practical solutions to not very well
defined problems.”
-- Owen Zhang
Top Ranked Kagglers list on their profiles:
• Electronics Engineer
• Quantitative Researcher
• Accounting, Finance and Risk
• Computer Science
• Credit risk modelling
• Entrepreneur
• Actuarial science
• Business Analyst
• No Physicists!? 

15. Are we there yet?
“I think I missed a trick along
the way...”
-- Jake Bouma

16. Culture is the spice that makes it Digital

17. Agile Platform
BIG DATA TECHNOLOGY
DATA SCIENCE
OPENNESS
CULTURE
AGILE
Questions Action
FeedbackImprovement
DEVOPS
The working digital system of insight?

18. AI v1.0
Questions Action
FeedbackImprovement

19. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaketbouma
https://github.com/jaketbouma
https://twitter.com/jaketbouma

20. Something to think about