Hadoop Adoption Summit
Location: Chicago, IL
Date: July 14, 2016
Summit Chairperson, Ankur Gupta – EVP Sales Bitwise, kicked things off with an introduction of the company. He showcased Bitwise’s unique strengths in Data and Analytics powered by Bitwisers, an elite corps of more than 1200 data professionals, and highlighted key offerings such as the ETL Conversion Automation, QualiDI ETL test automation, Hydrograph ETL offload to Hadoop, and Digital development capabilities.
After the brief but informative introduction, Ankur passed things over to Salil Sakhardande - President Bitwise, who formally welcomed the guests and introduced the Discover team, who conducted the featured session. This was a proud association since, not only is Bitwise celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, but also the fact that Discover has been a Bitwise customer for 19 of those 20 years. This milestone left even Discover’s Chief Data Officer (CDO), Chris Koehler impressed.
Making Data Work at Discover
Chris Koehler - CDO, VP, Advanced Analytics Technologies & Data Management started the session on Making Data Work at Discover by providing an overview of the organization’s strategy for leveraging data and analytics to stay ahead of the credit card and banking competition. One of the key points Chris made was the need to make decisions based on data instead of “who talks the loudest or who is the highest paid person in the room.”
Salima Yala - VP, Enterprise Modeling and Analytics was up next to elaborate on Discover’s business strategy for focusing on the customer. Salima discussed the need for a customer-centric strategy based on data analytics for understanding and predicting customer behavior as a means to drive revenue growth, strengthen customer loyalty and detect fraud. Building a data science team is key to this strategy, and Salima outlined the characteristics of good data scientists - as well as the challenges of finding them.
Following up on the organizational and business strategy discussion, Ka Tang – Director, Enterprise Data Architecture, dove into the technical side that supports the strategy. Ka talked about how Discover is enabling “NextGen Operational Analytics” with an enterprise data lake. In order to make data work in support of business analytics, Discover has embraced open source technologies, such as Hadoop for enterprise data lake architecture and Nifi to enable real-time fraud decisions.
Upon the conclusion of Ka’s session, the Discover team fielded questions on the technology stack as well as implementation strategy. A common challenge that organizations face in their journey to becoming a data-driven enterprise is the lack of skilled resources in the new technology areas. Chris offered his perspective by stating that while Discover’s ultimate goal is to develop these capabilities in-house, they rely on partners such as Bitwise to help them meet their requirements. Simply put, Discover, like most companies, cannot afford to wait to implement an analytics strategy.
Trends in Data Management and Analytics
After a brief break for coffee and snacks, sessions resumed with Shahab Kamal – EVP Solutions Bitwise and Bharat Prasad – Hadoop Solution Architect Bitwise taking on the subject of Hadoop Data Governance. What could have been a highly technical session turned out to be a lively and engaging discussion as every company is struggling with data governance on the journey to becoming a data-driven, analytics based organization.
The audience took up many discussion points on data governance, including challenges of meeting compliance requirements while enabling self-service analytics, concerns around moving data between on-premise and cloud environments, and the “enforcement” of enterprise data standards. Chris Koehler provided a CDO viewpoint that data is an organizational asset, not just an IT responsibility, and that both IT and Business leaders need to take on accountability for governance.
The data governance discussion transitioned well to the next session, Analytics Trends in Healthcare. Paddy Padmanabhan – CEO Damo Consulting, a noted healthcare analytics expert and friend of Bitwise, provided insights into healthcare analytics that have implications in other industries. Both healthcare and finance are highly regulated industries, which presents challenges and opportunities in developing analytics capabilities to gain a competitive edge.
Paddy’s session opened up an interesting discussion on data security and data ownership, which involved not just attendees from healthcare and finance organizations, but brought input from insurance, retail and pharma attendees as well. The concluding sentiment that capped the discussion and the sessions was that organizations need to adopt analytics to stay competitive, and that the journey to becoming a data-driven organization requires some early planning and strategic decision making that will result in long term gains.
Moving Forward
Bitwise Hadoop Adoption Summits are designed to provide executives with a venue for hearing how other leading organizations are solving their most pressing data challenges, and sharing their experiences with their peers. By inviting long term customers like Discover to talk about their approach to adopting open source tools such as Hadoop, Bitwise aims to offer an example of what is possible in developing analytics capabilities.
Immediate feedback from the attendees indicates that this information is valuable for benchmarking their own initiatives. One customer even referred to Bitwise as the “travel agents for your analytics journey” because of their ability to help you get to your destination faster and at less cost than otherwise possible.
Chicago is just one stop on a list of cities where Bitwise is planning similar Hadoop Adoption Summits with featured customer speakers. Stay tuned for a stop in a city near you, or contact us for details on how our team can help accelerate your data and analytics efforts.
