Companies are scrambling right now to respond to a rapidly changing context, and they’re using data to navigate the necessary transformations. But too often, they’ve failed to make needed changes because their solutions were tied to a legacy approach to analytics.
Dean Stoecker, co-founder and chief executive officer of data science and analytics company Alteryx, believes now is the critical time for changing course to achieve better business outcomes.
“Most companies don’t see success in digital transformation at all because they keep doing the same thing over and over,” he says. “If COVID-19’s problems aren’t a wake-up call that change is needed, then we’re all toast.”
We need a cultural shift that puts more emphasis on human creativity working in tandem with analytics tools and artificial intelligence. And to that point, businesses must take risks to liberate data and analytics, making those things available to a workforce full of untapped citizen data scientists.
“There’s only two million PhD data scientists in the world. There are never enough scientists to solve the world’s problems,” Stoecker explains.
The Analytic Process Automation movement
Enter Analytic Process Automation, or APA—a new movement that seeks to solve those problems by upskilling almost anyone to become part of an organization’s engine for analyzing and acting on data.
APA involves “turning every data worker into a discoverer of marginal profitability.” And the only way you can accomplish that is when you begin to treat data as an asset, democratize it, and make it available to the workforce.
“Most organizations don’t do this,” Stoecker explains. “What they do is hire scientists, buy big machines, and hope that they’re going to see better results. And it just never happens.”
The end-to-end analytics platform Alteryx provides to businesses is used by banks to do derivatives modeling, airlines to hedge fuel, retailers to optimize hyperlocal merchandising, and the Dallas Cowboys to do sentiment analysis in the stadium during the game.
Each of those is a case of a successful digital transformation for some part of an enterprise, and Stoecker says this progress has been made possible by Analytic Process Automation.
Alteryx was founded before many of the foundational changes for APA had fully taken hold, but Stoecker saw what was coming. “We started the company because we knew that point solutions were going to be dead, because they force people to change their approach to work and that’s demeaning to most workers,” he says.
Human-centric hyper-automation, not just AI
“We’re seeing this colliding world of AI and ML converge with BI and analytics,” Stoecker explains. “That means that that while the technologies are converging, the consumers or producers of those capabilities are also converging. We see this convergence of the trained statistician and the citizen data scientist.”
In 1960, computer scientist and psychologist J.C.R. Licklider wrote an influential paper titled “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” now common reading among business leaders, particularly in the tech space. Among other things, Licklider predicted a “man-computer symbiosis” whereby human beings and computers cooperate, with machines doing the routinizable work to pave the way for people to focus on insights and decisions.
But much of the emphasis of artificial intelligence and machine learning as they relate to analytics has been on the technology or artificial intelligence, not the people, and that’s where failed transformations are rooted.
To that point, Stoecker says: “You’ve got to get people to the thinking stage sooner… Analytic Process Automation gets people to the thinking stage sooner so you can get out of the mundane tasks of cleaning data and organizing data and finding data and sourcing data.”
The hardest part of this is cultural change, however—it’s required, but it’s extremely difficult for any enterprise. “Buying technology is easy,” Stoecker says. “Transforming cultures is very, very difficult, and it often takes a long period of time to accomplish.”
Organizations need to make these cultural shifts happen from the top down. They must have clear mission statements to recognize data as an asset and analytics as a prowess that each worker must possess, and leadership needs to create opportunities for workers to upskill into citizen data scientists.
Businesses also need to use technological solutions to enable those citizen data scientists’ creativity, as described in Licklider’s man-computer symbiosis model.
Amplifying human intelligence and creativity
“It’s amazing to me, the curiosity of the human being. If you give them a blank canvas with a bunch of building blocks they’ll build almost anything,” Stoecker says.
“One of the most popular kids’ toys is LEGOs,” he continues. “There’s a reason for that—because it illustrates their creativity and their curiosity. Data and analytics is exactly the same thing, and with APA, if you have a whole series of building blocks, you’d be shocked at what people can solve.”
The APA movement is growing in the marketplace; decision-makers are wising up to the limitations of AI without human creativity, and to the need for end-to-end platforms that reduce complexity and automate processes without demanding that workers write a stitch of code.
Only a small fraction of organizational data is used today, and it’s primarily used in a descriptive way. It might tell decision-makers what happened in some cases, but the information comes too late, and it lacks any number of creative insights from around the organizations that could make it more actionable.
Analytic Process Automation democratizes that information, allowing people to move from descriptive to prescriptive analytics. Just as importantly, it facilitates cultural and technological change to upskill workers in data science disciplines.
“It’s about amplifying human intelligence first,” Stoecker says. “In the end, it’s all about the convergence of democratizing data, and automating processes to free up your time so that you can learn more skills to answer bigger challenges, to seek out more of those transformative business outcomes.”
Learn more about the future of problem solving at https://www.alteryx.com/apa.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Alteryx.
