In n the new interconnected future we will have more information about our lives than ever before. But the data alone won’t be useful; someone will have to forensically examine everything before it’s turned into insights. Harvard Business Review called data science the “Sexiest Job of the 21st Century”. Seen as the dark arts of business, there’s far more to it than dressing up statistics; analysts use everything from machine learning to, data mining, and visualizations to unearth insights. Across the world, new positions are opening up the whole time but there’s one problem — there aren’t enough people to fill them.
The sexiest job in the world
Heads of business and policymakers have been warning us about the lack of people training for a career in data science for the past decade. “We have to intensely focus on the pipeline for the data analytics and AI side,” says Andrea Kollmorgen, Head of Connected eMobility at Siemens headquarters in Germany.
“With big data, the untold number of future services and add-on services is becoming critical.” In 2017, IBM predicted that demand for skilled professionals in the sector is set to rise 28 percent by 2020. On top of that, the former Chief Data Scientist of the United States Office of Science and Technology Policy, DJ Patil warned that the “shortage of data scientists is becoming a serious constraint in some sectors”.
Andrea needs data scientists to help her push Connected eMobility into the future. But the type of person she’s looking for is more than just a number cruncher. “I work within a very entrepreneurial, integrative ecosystem of thinking” she explains. “For someone to really make a difference in this field they need to be doing more than merely studying it — they need to be experiencing it too. From the sharing economy to driverless cars, the data scientists of the future will have the right mindset because they’ll already be living that in that world.”
How Andrea turned her life around, and made a difference
In another life, Andrea was an investment banker in New York. 25-years old and unsure of what she wanted to do, she left her home state of Virginia in America to live in the big city — but it didn’t turn out as she planned. “Basically, I ended up in a subprime hedge fund that barely survived the financial crisis,” she says. “I had a lot of older colleagues look at me and say ‘you will learn lessons from this experience for the rest of your life. And they were right.”
Working in an industry that was actively contributing to a worldwide financial crisis turned out to be the opposite of what she wanted. It dawned on Andrea that she needed to do more with her life. So that’s exactly what she did. The following year, despite having never set foot in the country before, Andrea packed her bags, moved to Spain and enrolled in business school: “I took myself away from investment banking because I wanted to be a part of something new.” After graduating, she was offered a job at Siemens Management Consulting in Munich. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work in a new field while exploring her roots. “I have a very Germanic-sounding name,” she says. “But I’m American so when they offered me a job at Siemens in Munich I said absolutely!”
As a young female without an engineering background, she’s not what some people expect of Siemens. “I’ve only been in the company for five years,” she says. “But I’m navigating my way here, to the head of Connected eMobility. It also helps that I’ve also had fantastic mentoring and support from the Siemens leadership team.” Andrea has only been in the new role for ten months but she’s already making the most out of it. “This has been the perfect opportunity for me,” she says. “For me to grow, but also for me to leverage my skills and connect with a lot of new people.” It may not be where her 20-year-old self expected to end up, but she’s never felt more fulfilled or challenged: “I wanted to be a part of the solution rather than the problem. How can things be better and how can I be active in that change? I’m finding that pretty much everyone working in Connected eMobility has the same mindset.”
Everything is now digital
2017 was the year of electrification. In Norway, sales of electric cars overtook gas for the first time, and across the world plans for electric trains, boats, and even planes were unveiled as both governments and businesses alike stepped up to fight the effects of climate change. This sudden race towards an electric future is turning the world of transport on its head. Just as physical innovation was the hallmark of the industrials revolution, software is set to be the agent of change for the next.“Transport is undergoing an existential transformation,” says Andrea. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the turn of the twentieth century.”
Every company needs to stay ahead of the game, but none more so than Siemens. Their heritage spans 170 years, but no one should ever rest on their laurels alone. So they decided to make a big change in their company and refine what they do. It all began when the company noticed similar trends appearing in different divisions. Across the market; digitalization, automation, and electrification were becoming more and more central to the business. “It was at that point the company realized that we couldn’t rely on our existing structure alone,” Andrea says. “We needed a new way of collaborating across different markets and divisions, or we were going to fall behind in innovation.”
It’s hard for things to thrive in a silo, but distinctions help companies communicate all the different things they do. The problem with the previous categories was they didn’t adapt to the speed and impact of disruptive technologies, so the company’s Chief Technology Officer and Managing Board Member, Dr Roland Busch, came up with a new approach. In 2017, he launched 14 core technology topics for the company to focus on. The new focus would help the company be more agile and respond quickly to new innovations. “When Dr Busch offered me the job of Head of Connected eMobility,” Andrea says. “He told me it was a story of growth.”
Andrea separates her role into three different areas; the first is eMobility: electric propulsion (from buses to trucks, planes and boats) and the infrastructure needed to support it (charging stations and electric lines), second are the connected & digital mobility technologies and business models and thirdly, there are all the opportunities it opens up when these first two meet each other — especially to solve the mobility challenges within cities. “It really is a convergence of everything,” says Andrea. “Electrification, connectivity, the sharing economy, autonomous driving — it’s all starting to come together. It’s all changing because digitalization is attacking the value chain by squeezing out the weakest link.”
Why is data valuable?
Before everything became digital, defining something’s value was clear-cut; you made a product and then sold it. But things aren’t that simple anymore. “Take a car manufacturer,” Andrea says. “In the future, they may not sell the car to the owner but instead they might lease a part of it, like the battery, in order to collect the data. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions about where the money is going to be made.”
It’s hard to predict how things will pan out in the future, but the one thing Andrea’s team know for certain is that data will be paramount because everything will be connected. But the data itself isn’t the valuable part, it’s how to use it to spot new opportunities. Imagine the scenario; in the middle of a busy city, a company decides to install a pole for people to recharge their vehicles — that’s their main product. But people need to pay for their energy so the company develops a payment system — that’s another. As more and more customers start to use the system, data about their behavior starts to build up.
It opens up the opportunity for targeted advertising, but that might not be something the company themselves can do, so they partner with a startup and it all snowballs from there. “We’re creating a new ecosystem,” says Andrea. “In the future, there’s going to be enough infrastructure rolled out around the world where our work will become a sort of AI machine learning game.”
As head of a new unit, Andrea wants to shape how the company will work in the future, by focusing on collaboration. “In the future people won’t work in isolation,” she elaborates. “They’ll know what lane they’re in, but they’ll also understand the importance of trying out new things. Ideas and innovations come from working with new, and sometimes adjacent, fields.”
Since May 2017, she has been running the whole Connected eMobility with a collaborative approach. If she needs anything, she crowdsources it from other parts of the company. Siemens isn’t short of resources, but Andrea wants to build something new. It’s a lesson she learned throughout her career — if you want to make a difference, you need to be prepared to make a change.
Andrea Kollmorgen is Head of Connected eMobility — one of fourteen Company Core Technology areas. Her role focuses on cross-unit collaboration projects to identify and develop future technologies and business models for an electric, autonomous, connected and shared mobility future. When she isn’t on a long distance trek in the mountains with her boyfriend, she calls Munich home. Find out more about working at Siemens.
Photography: iStock
