It’s time to get real for executives hoping to make money from business data. After all the daydreaming, consulting with digital-transformation advisers and going on software shopping sprees, they have to get up and get to work.

But data science — at least in its current, profit-driving iteration — is young. Companies can’t be blamed for feeling a bit lost as to how to actually live it. What does Day Two data science look like, anyway? And what can it accomplish for companies that put in the effort?

To find out, we gathered five data pros dipping their digits deep in real-world data problems every day. These aren’t the people proselytizing data monetization based on some things they’ve read. These are data experts of companies putting data analytics to work. They’re expected to analyze and actually use data in ways their bosses can see on the bottom line.

To discuss the progress of data science in business and what a day at work is like for a real data pro, Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Seth Dobrin, vice president and chief data officer of IBM Analytics at IBM Corp., spoke to a panel of “data all stars” during the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit this week in San Francisco. 

They were joined by panelists Jung Park (pictured, top row right), chief operating officer of Latitude Food Allergy Care; Parag Shrivastava (pictured, front row center), senior director of enterprise data architecture at McKesson Corp.; Carl Gold (pictured, front row right), chief data scientist at Zuora Inc.; Rolland Ho (pictured, back row left), vice president of data and analytics at Clover Health Inc.; and Lucia Mendoza-Ronquillo (pictured, front row left), senior vice president and head of business intelligence and data governance at Wells Fargo & Co. (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

When one plus one equals three

To understand where data analytics is today, it’s useful to look at how widely it has roved over the past few years. It’s gone from a backroom, maybe-someday experiment to the everyday agendas of line-of-business people.

That’s reflected in the resumes of those who work in the field. Over the past three years, Jung Park has worked for three companies in seven distinct roles. He began his career in data analytics and business intelligence. Then, he started working closely with the information technology team. After that, he became a compliance officer.

Park’s company, Latitude, is a healthcare company specializing in treatment of people with food allergies. All the expertise Jung gathered in his previous roles comes together in his latest role as chief operating officer. One thing he’s seen in all of these roles is that to be valuable to companies, data and data scientists can’t be confined to some sterile data-science laboratory. In particular, it has to become a fixture on the business side.

“That is the most important part,” Park said. “If you stand alone as a data scientist or data analyst or a data officer and you don’t incorporate the business, you alienate the folks.”

When data science is brought into the real world of business, it results in a phenomenon where one plus one equals three, according to Park. Data science and business bound together produce a synergy that achieves more than either could by themselves, he added.

Data literacy and the use-case bottleneck

Data itself rarely holds companies back from analytics or monetization projects nowadays, according to Ho. Years ago, it may have been the case that they could not access the data or place it on a proper platform for analysis. But the technology available today makes this much easier and more affordable to experiment, he explained. But that does not mean all businesses know how to leverage data and technology toward a practical business goal.

“I think the bottleneck is really around the business understanding the use case,” Ho said.

Efforts to raise data literacy across whole businesses is underway. Companies might hold gamified competitions to raise data awareness among businesspeople, for example. Greater education is particularly important now with “data democratization” across companies and strict GDPR regulations coming into play simultaneously.

Mendoza-Ronquillo is charged with data governance oversight at Wells Fargo. “My role is to make sure our line-of-business complies with data governance policies for enterprise,” she said. “A good day for me is when I don’t get a call — the regulators aren’t knocking on our door asking for additional reports or have questions on the data.”

The parts and holistic-analytics

Experts, vendors and practitioners have been encouraging companies to de-silo data and data science for some time. With a complete picture from data, they can make better decisions for themselves and for customers.

McKesson distributes pharmaceuticals and provides healthcare IT, medical supplies and care-management tools. It has about a third of the world’s pharmaceutical supply-chain clinical data, according to Shrivastava. His team, which includes data product owners and data architects, is responsible for looking at all data holistically and creating a data foundation layer.

“A good day is looking at when data improves the business,” Shrivastava said. This occurred when McKesson opted to make an acquisition of an $8 billion pharmaceutical company in Europe. It achieved this with the help of its synergy solution based on analytics and data, which it built with the help of partners such as IBM.

Deep customer data is where the money is

Choosing which data sets to incorporate for helpful informative view of the business can be tricky. Collecting so much as to introduce noise and too little are both possible. Selecting the right type and amount can depend on defining the business goal from the outset.

Business goals are often tied closely to customer experience. This is why incorporating data sets from out on the arms of the business — deep in customer territory — can yield some of the richest business results. Research cited by McKinsey and Co. found that organizations leveraging customers’ behavioral data to gain insights on them outdo competitors by 85% in sales growth and over 25% in gross margin.

Latitude is helping patients overcome allergies by a method of incremental ingestion leading to desensitization. Effective treatment requires data on specific patients from before, during and after direct engagement with Latitude, according to Park. He thinks about gathering this data as charting a kind of “patient journey.”

The deeper data delves into customer experience, the more it may help businesses hone and reach goals, Gold pointed out. Zuora’s platform for enabling subscription business models pulls in tons of data on the actual performance of its users.

“It’s very easy to predict customer churn if you capture data that pertains to the value customers are receiving,” Gold said. “If you don’t capture that data then you’ll never predict churn by counting how many times they log in or more crude measures of engagement.”

Here’s the complete video discussion, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE