Interview Series — Ram Krishnamurthy
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, Ram. Can you tell us a little about yourself?
Ram: I am an Insights and Analytics Leader with a wide spectrum of experience market research , analytics and problem solving — over 30 years across three continents, equally in consultancy and user environments .Last worked at The Coca-Cola Company for 15 years till April 2016. Now emerging from sabbatical..
CiA: What does analytics mean to you/your company?
Ram: It is a large part of what I have been doing in the last 10 years or so ; it is/should be a competitive edge for any brand or company.
CiA: Can you provide our forum with an analytics challenges that you’ve come across?
Ram:
a) The Wood and the Trees problem — you have to complement the Analysis with Synthesis, and look for the big picture. By definition, analysis tends to break things down to smaller pieces , which individually can proliferate and quickly lead to ‘analysis paralysis’. It is important to constantly look for meaning in the analytics, synthesizing , and hence story-telling.
b) You will never have perfect data, how creative can you get and stay robust enough to be credible — this is in a way related to the idea that analysis should always be with a purpose, answering a question, solving a problem, and not an end in itself.If you accept that you are then in the realm of practical applications and very rarely will you have an entirely data-based analytical solution to a real life problem. So analytics needs to be creative, allow for judgment, look for 80% solutions and so on. The challenge of course then is how to do this in a structured, disciplined way so the Science is not sacrificed.
CiA: What are the most common analytics mistake you’ve seen people making?
Ram: Correlation reported as causation ! This is very common and seems a trivial thing to point out. but you can see hugely important decisions being made on analysis that establishes a relationship , which may or may not be causal. This sometimes results in the wrong problem being ‘solved’ ; sometimes it makes a case for very large investments in these solutions, clearly a productivity problem..
CiA: Do you have any career advice for aspiring analysts?
Ram: Get the answer and then go back and ask what really is the question? Ties into the first challenge above — analysis can be such a self-absorbing activity that we tend to find a lot of little nuggets that actually might have little relevance to the question at hand. important to keep focus on the original question — and it help to have once central question to address, not several at the same time…
CiA: Thank you, Ram. As always, we will now turn things over to our members and see what questions they have.
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