Challenge Exercise for Understanding Next-Gen Analytics

Here is an exercise to challenge your team of analytic innovation folks …as was inspired by the Qlik & Alteryx events.

1. Gather a few colleagues who are open-minded free-thinking techies about data analytics for a one-hour brainstorm. Provide lunch or better wine/beer and snacks.

2. Explain OpenAI MuseNet as generating music using 10 instruments in various styles. This neural net is not explicitly programmed (crafted logic). It was trained from examples in hundreds of thousands of MIDI files to discovered patterns of harmony, rhythm, and style to predict the likely next note.

3. Play one of the samples, like Bluegrass piano (1:40) from SoundCloud.

4. Play the sample again. But this time imagine that this melody is actually the ‘music’ you play for a specific customer who just touch your company. What music should you play for that person to increase their likelihood to purchase a product or at least leave with a positive attitude toward your company? What signals from the customer are likely to indicate what music would resonate with that customer? Brainstorming for 10–15 minutes.

5. Then, take the discussion to a deeper level. The music is not a sequence of MIDI notes, but it is now sequence of micro-actions that your CRM spawns as a micro-campaign, tailored for just that one person. What would that look like? How would you do that (given unlimited resources)? Realize that all this would come naturally if you were an owner/operator of a small retail store. This is called intelligent effectiveness. [ref: New Values]

6. Define the business use case, beginning with an initial value proposition. What are the explicit outputs from the Analytic Blackbox? How would you measure their goodness? And then, what are the inputs? Are there suitable Inputs available from existing data sources? Or, what are the inputs that are not available but are likely to contain the ‘signal’ required for good outputs?

7. Do a prototype, quickly and cheaply. Throw it away but learn from it!

8. Finally, have fun… 😉 (and please share your experience in the comments below)