CHAPTER 2 Emerging AI and Data Analytics Tooling and Disciplines

      Companies pursue digital transformation as part of an overall overhaul of business models, as legacy models no longer apply in the current technology-driven environment. As notable technology companies have disrupted entire industries over the past two decades, service companies have pursued digital transformation to remain relevant, develop a competitive edge, and to integrate successful technology innovations into their overall strategy. Many companies regard data as one of their most valuable assets, and digital transformation initiatives are often centered around creating systems and processes to unlock this value. Some of the top reasons that organizations undertake the effort is to unlock data value, to better understand their customers, and to improve products and services. Within finance, accounting, and operations functions, digital transformation initiatives have been more focused on value creation through process control, efficiency savings, and improved reporting.

The low-hanging fruit in finance, accounting, and operations functions is to automate unstructured manual spreadsheet processes using self-service analytics tooling and robotic. process automation (RPA) to increase control and to capture process efficiencies. Enhanced processing and reporting can be achieved by ingesting high-quality data into self-service analytics tools for enrichment and automated processing, before outputs are communicated visually with low-latency, interactive dashboards. Cost savings can be realized by freeing up human capital from the manual and repetitive performance of routinized processes. Further, manual processes performed in spreadsheets are error-prone, and resulting errors can cascade into other dependent processes and continue to proliferate undetected. The reduced dependence on spreadsheets for manual processing can reduce the possibility of introducing errors and can thereby improve the expected quality of processing outputs. These two goals – control and efficiency – are the key motivations for organizations to adopt automation tooling and will be the predominant focus of this book. However, there are additional motivational factors as well.

      Increased job satisfaction and full resource actualization can occur when employees focus on tasks that enhance value for the organization, rather than on mundane, redundant, and low value-added processing steps and activities. By reducing the proportion of time that individuals spend on the manual tail performed outside of systems (data staging, cleansing, enriching, reformatting, and processing), relative to the time spent performing value-added analysis to generate actionable business insights, employees can more readily create value. Organizations benefit through increased process stability and productivity, while employees benefit from increased focus, increased engagement, and true process ownership. In some cases, advanced analytics can be applied to use machine learning and artificial intelligence models for decision-making. New applications of advanced analytics emerge daily and are limited only by the collective imagination, but in large spreadsheet processing plants, “small” automation efforts aimed at improving control and realizing efficiencies and cost savings one process at a time will come to the fore. Self-service data analytics tooling can enable these efforts and will largely be the focus of this book.

Introduction to Data Analytics Tooling

A decade or more into the data analytics era, many readers will have heard reference to a number of data analytics disciplines and technologies. Some of them have highly technical and sexy sounding names, while others may sound vaguely familiar, if lackluster. In the following pages, we will provide a very high level introduction to a handful of key data analytics technologies, with which managers should be familiar. They all form the living backdrop against which specific analytics applications have emerged. Only a small subset of these are considered to be self-service data analytics tools, but all of these have been successfully demonstrated to add value, when applied appropriately to use cases with adequately rich benefits at scale. In the following sections, we will introduce some of the data analytics disciplines and technologies that have matured and risen to prominence. Note that these abbreviated introductions only scratch the surface of the suite of emerging technologies marching under the broad banner of data analytics.

      Internet of Things

      One of your authors was a houseguest in a luxury Manhattan apartment roughly 15 years ago, in 2005. He recalls being shown around and impressed that previously stand-alone items were now connected and controlled by the internet. One specific appliance that caught his eye was the refrigerator, which featured a small TV monitor on its door. The homeowner explained that with his “connected” fridge, he was able to maintain an inventory of what necessities were on hand and could easily make a list of the items he needed to purchase. He could even place an online order to have those items delivered. This was an amazing step forward at that time.

      Now, any number of items in our homes are connected to the internet – smart TVs, thermostats, security cameras and home alarms, door locks and garage door openers, lightbulbs, a variety of Amazon Alexa and Google Home hubs, stereos and speaker systems, and far more. Looking forward another 15 years, we predict that readers of future editions of this book may not even recall the age when these connected “things” were not in our homes and relied on to provide the weather forecast, to recommend items for our shopping lists, and to consume streaming podcasts, music stations, and video content. Clearly, we are interacting with and consuming data at an unseen level, but on the flip side, we are generating consumer data at an explosive clip.

The “internet of things” (IoT) is one of the factors that is driving the data explosion. All of these connected items are generating colorful data on consumer choices, our buying patterns, and our individual routines. When do we check the weather? When do we leave for work and typically return at home after our workday? When do we turn up the heat or cool our homes down? How many times did the garage door go up and down throughout the day? What movement was captured and logged near the back door on our connected security camera? What do we order when we have our meals delivered? If you consider the vast array of high-velocity data types and the number of observations being collected, it is easy to see how the term “Big Data” was coined. How your organization mobilizes to connect to this data for logistical and client relationship benefits will set the tone for success in the next decade. How you, as an individual, can adopt emerging technologies to get on board in the new digital landscape will position