Interview Series — Concha Labra
Hosted by Career in Analytics
Welcome to the next installment of Career in Analytics’ interview series. This forum is designed for decision science professionals — both beginners and veterans — to meet one of our members and engage in a conversation with them. We want our group to be a place for great conversation and debate.
CiA: Welcome, Concha. Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Concha: I’m Big Data Manager at Bankia, one of the biggest banks in Spain. I’m experienced in managing Big Data and Digital Transformation plans, advising in how to layout the Big Data strategy and leading the roadmap execution altogether with Business and Technology areas.
CiA: What does analytics mean to you/your company?
Concha: Big Data is disrupting Analytics in Banking. Analytics has been always used for Risk, Business Intelligence and so on. But now we can leverage more and more data from our customers in order to know them better and to provide more customized services. To take full advantage of this you have to become a data-driven company and this is a huge challenge involving not only analytical or technological issues but also cultural changes.
CiA: Can you provide our forum with an analytics challenges that you’ve come across?
Concha: One of the main challenges existent nowadays is getting Analytics out of the lab. One thing is developing a bunch of models and to get good performance in the lab and another one is having hundreds of them working together in a large-scale online real world. You have different challenges, by instance: monitoring the models to detect when performance drops in order to retrain; preparing the input data in a efficient way; integrating the results in a continuous workflow to guide decisions, etc. And you have to manage all of that in a seamless way, sometimes in real time.
I think for the coming years industry is going to see an increasing commoditization oriented to building and frictionless operationalization of predictive models. We are moving from a handcrafted stage to a more automatized stage with environments and platforms easing tasks as feature selection, evaluation based on A/B testing and, in general, helping us to set more agile and integrated workflows.
On the other hand, Digital Transformation needs unified user models that are able to provide a more comprehensive view of users and customization in order to avoid the spread of multiple loose models that, at last, are very difficult to govern. User modeling isn’t new but I think it’s going to gain more traction in the future.
CiA: What are the biggest analytics mistake you’ve seen people making?
Concha: One usual bias in Analysts comes from academic education. They are taught to evaluate their models based mainly on metrics like precision, recall, etc. Then, sometimes, they tend to work overly complicated models in order to gain marginal improvements. I think Analysts should focus more in the big picture, in how to support a more agile and data-driven culture and, at the end of the day, in how to help companies to achieve better insights and decisions.
Another common mistake is to think that Big Data is the silver bullet for large-scale Analytics. The truth is that not all current Machine learning algorithms are able to take advantage of distribution and parallelization of Big Data clusters. A lot of work has to be done yet in order to address this issue.
CiA: Do you have any career advice for aspiring data scientists?
Concha: Current Analytics is a mix of Mathematics, Computer Science and Business. The tools, languages, algorithms, etc. are going to change and to commoditize. So don’t focus too much on them: you have to get the big picture, to think out the box.
In the future Analytics is going to be more and more Machine Learning oriented and is going to approach Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science or whatever they call it in the next years. At the end of the day it’s about having machines doing the mechanistic work and helping, hopefully, human beings to take full advantage of all the available information.
CiA: Thank you, Concha. As always, we will now turn things over to our members and see what questions they have.
Career in Analytics is a forum dedicated to connecting beginning analysts with experienced and veteran mentors. Our topics cover a variety of interests in the area of analytics and professional career development.
We would also like to thank — Corsair’s Publishing for their help in bringing this content to you!
