This last Tuesday, I lead the ‘Discover Big Data’ workshop at the First European Celebration of Women in Computing. There were many parallel sessions that morning and I received some questions about my presentation from the participants that couldn’t divide themselves to attend this workshop 😉
Welcome to the Big Data workshop, we need women in Big Data!
This workshop is called ‘Discover Big Data’ because Big Data is a hyped word. It is being used for anything where data is involved, but it still remains confusing as what it means.
- You are also in Big Data if you are dealing with data that has to be processed at great velocity, as is the case for GPS or for mobile phones.
- You are in Big Data if you cross information that come on a variety of formats, like your customer’s transactions and your customer’s emails, or if you go to the social networks, like Facebook or Twitter. You can discover what are the topics being discussed, what is being said about your company or who is talking about your product.
- You are in Big Data if you’re exploiting one of the many big available datasets like weather information, official administration records like property records or financial information, economic indicators…
What can be done with Big Data?
It is mainly used for customer intimacy, discovering your customer profiles and target them on a one to one base. Finding their preferences and the hidden patterns to predict customer churn.
It can be used for optimisation, finding patterns of systematic problems hidden in your historical data. It can help for organising your maintenance, or to improve the supply-chain, finding better logistic solutions, optimise processes.
It is also used for innovation: It can help you create your new product. Looking at your competitors and finding the white-spaces or uncovering market trends.
And more generally, with all the available data you can create models forecasting future events and behaviors. Through what-if analysis to predict the outcomes of potential changes, you can direct your business strategy. It helps anticipating previously unforeseen opportunities, as well as avoiding costly situations, finding new revenue opportunities or identifying more effective business models.
As you see, there are great business opportunities!
How can we do all that?
There are many techniques like statistical analysis, data mining, text analysis, sentiment analysis, graph analysis, machine learning, predictive analysis, neural networks, conceptual clustering…
You may have heard already some of those words that sound promising but that also sound very complicated. And even so, the Big Data field is growing exponentially as men are running for it. There are only 10% of women, don’t you want to be part of it? Companies that took this wave are thriving, well ahead of classical business. They are proposing you the right product at the right time, with the features you are looking for, for the price you are willing to pay. They are increasing their profits while shaping our future with the products and business strategies they are creating.
I hear you saying: This is great but I don’t know a thing about this and it sounds so complicated. I’m here to tell you that not all of it is that difficult.
YOU could be in Big Data.
If you are in computing you have a leg up. And if you like mathematics you’ll enjoy being a data scientist. But you could be in Big Data even if you are not a techy person. If you are in HR, in marketing, if you are a manager or a decision-maker with the right mindset open to data, you can exploit the Big Data wave.
Even if you see the potential, women tend to think ‘it’s not for me, I don’t have the competencies’.
Let me use some feminine stereotypes to illustrate we have the basic skills:
- We have a tradition of getting together and talking too much. And we have a tendency to be matchmakers. We can put those skills of information gathering and making connections to good use finding relationships between data.
- Who recognises herself in this? We are control freaks and plan everything, even the time of our loved ones. Don’t you have a TODO list for your partner on Saturdays? I do: Love, since you are driving Alex to the scouts, could you please pass by and drop the trousers at the dry cleaner? What if you knew what your GPS knows already, that a road is blocked? You could have asked him to bring some bread back as he’s going to pass near the bakery. Don’t you feel satisfaction when doing things efficiently, optimising the Saturday time? So imagine tapping into all the available information and using it to improve the processes, it’s a rewarding job.
- And if you have artistic skills, visualisation is your field. This is a new branch of data science, they are creating new techniques very interesting to show more than 3 dimensions of data, so you can see easily relationships graphically.
- Generally speaking, I think we women have a natural talent to be data analysts: the ‘What if’ comes natural to us, we always investigate all possibilities before deciding for one, isn’t it?
Summarising, we saw there is business in here, and that we have the basic skills to be in the Data business.
Moreover, it is important that more women move into this field, not only because of the many business opportunities, but also because there are ethical issues involved in Big Data. We can mention data privacy and price gauging as some of these issues, but there are other business models that can be controversial.
The rules of what can be done with the data and what is off-limits, are being defined right now. Let’s not miss the opportunity to give our view on this.
As an example, there is a great initiative from the Data2X program of the UN, who’s doing a research on women’s freedom of movements through satellite images and their phone geolocation. Are they limited in their movements in some countries, do they have access to education, to health care? Great initiative, but what about the same at a private level: is following the movement of your partner with her/his phone geolocation ethical? What about tracking the movement of your children, as it’s done already in some countries?
It’s important to have our saying in the ethical uses of all those lakes of data and be represented in the decisions that will define our future society. We, women, have a natural tendency of looking after our loved ones, taking their needs in consideration. That’s what Big Data is needing, people that set the rules for using the incredible amounts of data, taking into account the different perspectives and with a long term view in mind. It’s the moment to use our feminine voice to shape a better society for all of us, participating also in the creation of the new business models.
In this workshop you will hear success stories to show you the opportunities to be included in this field. I hope you’ll join the Big Data movement.
