Set Your Insights Free

As more businesses adopt data science, they seem to be focusing on what data they have and what insights they can derive from it. Sometimes however, they forget how these insights can be effectively disseminated throughout the organization. Of course the real value of data science lies in the ability to act on insights generated. But how can this happen if new insights don’t ever get beyond a targeted recipient? This makes it difficult for the business as a whole to gain value. How then do we make insights and the value generated by data scientists, widely accessible across an organization? Enters DevOps. DevOps as borrowed from software engineering, can help by providing practical solutions, such as building dashboards, APIs and repositories. Doing this creates additional value by providing more people with access to insights generated from other data science teams and departments. Even in smaller organizations, the impact of a data scientist can be minimal if the organization fails to integrate insights into the business’ wider systems, strategy and culture. Unfortunately many organizations are unable to effectively disseminate and transfer knowledge across teams, let alone business units. Not only does this breed cynicism around the value of data science, but it also leads to wasteful duplication of effort. The team at Airbnb married different tools to come up with a system that allows insights uncovered by anyone in the organization to be accessible by everyone else. This engenders trust and ensures reproducibility, quality, consumability, and learning. Just as DevOps is able to bridge the gap between software development and operations in the software engineering world, it can also help to close the gap between data science and business impact. Starting this dialogue will promote collaboration and integration and go a long way to realizing the value data science can bring.