Data is the fuel of the future, but it’s a fuel that must be refined. Raw data alone is just noise. Curated data can deliver some insights, but picking and choosing leaves out the greater picture. To get the most value from data, businesses are looking to the end user and data science, which is the practice of turning data into real information, insights, and most crucial, action.

“The CEO truly understands, as do the board members, that the power of many of their decisions are lying today in the data. They want to be able to touch the data and explore the data and really try to dig into it themselves,” said Sinead Kaiya, COO of products and innovation at SAP.

To get a better idea of the interaction between companies and data science, Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live-streaming studio, spoke to Kaiya during the Stanford Global Women in Data Science Conference event in Stanford, CA. (*Disclosure below.)

Touching the data

The discussion opened up as Kaiya told a brief story about the executives at SAP. They have huge digital touchpads in the boardrooms, and the executives use those pads to touch the data and manipulate it for themselves, she revealed. High-level people don’t want a paper report anymore, they want to see the information come alive. Where CEOs need to go next is to have people who make sense of that data using science, Kaiya stated.

Still, that data must be put to use. At SAP, the power is when they start co-innovating with their customers, Kaiya observed. Through SAP, customers are getting real-time data and connecting it to their IT systems. “It’s when we can apply our technology to their problems that things come together,” she said.

This collaboration is becoming more important than ever before. You have to collaborate with the end user, Kaiya asserted. Techs in IT simply can’t consider all the possible biases someone would see in the field. To remove biases, she said to get the user involved your system. “Go to the user,” she said.

This tight collaboration represents a change in the industry. SAP used to only have contact with the customer’s IT department, forcing them to work through that filter, Kaiya mentioned. Now, companies are opening the doors and allowing them to work directly with the end user, she stated.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Stanford Global Women in Data Science (WiDS) Conference. (*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a media partner at the conference. Neither Stanford nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE