International Institute for Analytics

We co-founded the International Institute for Analytics in 2010. Since it’s now 2020, our sophisticated math skills tell us that IIA has been around for about a decade—although our first full year of operation was in 2011. We thought it might be interesting to reflect on the state of the field that IIA addresses and how it has changed over time.

The role of Citizen Data Scientist has been showing rapid growth, though not without some controversy. Many people are concerned that democratizing data science is about giving people capabilities way beyond what they are ready to handle and, therefore, ensuring disasters as a result. While bad outcomes can certainly happen if things aren’t planned and implemented well, it is possible to minimize risk by approaching a citizen data science program with the right mindset.

It’s still early days for artificial intelligence (AI) in the enterprise, and if you have some responsibility for analytics and/or AI within your company, you may be wondering just how hard you should push for the technology. Dip a toe in the water? A bit more substantial investment and effort? Or should you adopt the AI equivalent of “competing on analytics” and go full steam ahead with making your business more artificially intelligent? And what criteria should you employ in making this decision?

The vast majority of people building analytics and data science processes have every intention of being good and ethical. As a result, most potentially unethical and evil processes arise in situations where that wasn’t the intention. The problem is typically that proper focus and governance is not in place to keep analytics and data science processes on the side of good. On top of that, what is good and what is evil isn’t nearly as clear cut as we’d wish it to be.

We’ve had technical people focused on the ingestion and management of data for decades. But, only recently has data engineering become a critical, widespread role. Why is that? This post will outline a somewhat contrarian view as to why data engineering has become a critical function and how we might expect the role to evolve over time.

Lately I’ve had a lot of conversations with clients about the intersection of ethics and analytics. I’ve also been presenting on the topic at a number of conferences. The interest in ethics has exploded recently, driven in large part by the rise of artificial intelligence. One common question I get is what my top tip would be for a company to get started in becoming a leader in analytical ethics. I’ll discuss my answer in this post: intentionality.

Not long ago, the role of Data Scientist was what most companies wanted to discuss with me in terms of roles they needed to understand and add to their organizations. Then, the role of Data Engineer became a big topic of discussion. In the past year, there has been a massive increase of attention being paid to yet another role that is still new enough that its title hasn’t been standardized. This role is referred to by a range of names from Analytics Translator, to Analytics Catalyst, to Analytics Liaison, and more.

Historically, concerns about over-zealous censorship have focused on repressive governments. In recent times, however, a new path to censorship has arisen in the form of search engine and social media companies that are building analytically-based censorship algorithms. This post outlines why using analytics for centralized censorship is a steep and slippery slope and also lay out an alternative that will enable those same censorship analytics to provide people with a choice rather than a dictate.

While there are many advantages to the cloud, it is also necessary to use caution to make sure that the risks of the cloud are mitigated while pursuing the advantages.

Nearly 200 of IIA’s clients, analytics experts, and members of the analytics community gathered in Portland, Oregon this week for the spring Analytics Symposium. IIA also hosted its first Women in Analytics networking event, an interactive Analytics Workshop, and introduced two tracks of sessions to bring the most value to attendees. This blog covers key themes of the conference and highlights from each session.