front matter
Over the past decade, I chaired or co-chaired more than 40 premier data and AI conferences internationally. It has been amazing to witness the evolution and impact of analytics, data science, and machine learning worldwide. Data science continues to be one of the fastest-growing job functions in the industry today. When I was the chief data scientist of O’Reilly Media, study after study we conducted confirmed that companies continue to invest in data infrastructure, data science, and machine learning. We also found the companies that excel in using data science and machine learning were the ones that invested in foundational technologies and used those tools to expand their capabilities gradually, one use case at a time.
While much of what we read about pertains to tools or breakthroughs in models, the reality is that organizational issues pose some of the major bottlenecks within most companies. The critical ingredient is recognizing organizational excellence in people, culture, and structure. If you don’t have the right people and organizational structure in place, you will still underperform competitors that do.