Podcasts about analytics the new science

It's a line from the TV series, The Americans. In season 3, episode 3 FBI agent Stan Beeman is asked about his past undercover work where he infiltrated a white supremacist group. The colleague asks him how he was able to succeed in that assignment. Stan tells him you just keep on telling them what they want to hear, over and over and over again. Then he utters the great line, "People love hearing how right they are." Years of coaching people -mostly high performers 'cause they're the ones most focused on getting better - have shown me how true it is. I've had a few non-high performers who resisted the process of coaching because they mostly wanted to hear how good they already are. Well, they thought they did until I challenged them to look more closely in the mirror and stop making excuses. When we hear how right we are, we can avoid thinking about how wrong we might be. So I get it. The urge to constantly feel good about ourselves is real. It sure beats feeling bad about ourselves. But that's the trouble with modern culture - the assumption that it feels bad to realize we can do (or be) better! It's a lie though and most of us likely know it because we've felt tremendous pride in growing and improving ourselves. Not Everybody Finds Value In Being Challenged - No Matter How Much Care Is Displayed In 2007 a book was published that provided one of the biggest challenges to me - Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning. I loved that book because it challenged many things for me. It was invigorating. Immediately I started viewing business - the business I was operating - through a different lens. My curiosity soared, which is saying something because I was already driven by questions. My experience with that book helped me better understand what had - up to that point - been a lifelong pursuit of seeking challenges. Challenges to my assumptions. Challenges to my perspectives. Challenges to what I had already learned. It had begun from years of studying with older men about the Bible. Working hard to derive whatever wisdom could be passed on. Asking questions. Looking for areas where I could grow and improve. Turns out there weren't any areas where I couldn't grow or improve. ;) In my 20s I developed a habit that was foreign to the industry where I worked. The business plan. I wasn't involved in the startup world. I was mostly involved in more turnaround work - taking an existing enterprise from one level of success to a higher level. I began to write detailed, in-depth business plans to answer questions I'd ask about the organization I was involved in. I'd spend hours digging for the truth - looking for facts and evidence from which to draw conclusions. 3M was a premier company at the time. Not that they're not today, but I knew some employees of 3M and it was clear their company was on the bleeding edge of innovation and fact-finding. These were the days of Jack Welch's General Electric, and I became a big fan. Those two enormous companies - 3M and GE - were very instrumental in my quest to challenge myself. This was my professional life in the early 80s. By 1982 I was beginning to gain some insight into how others viewed being challenged. I was forming my own leadership philosophy - and my own business viewpoints on how to best build, organize and grow an organization. The more people I hired the more apparent it became that the ideal candidate for my style of leadership were people who most enjoyed being caringly challenged. Heavy on the descriptor, caringly. Which in my mind didn't mean soft-pedaling, but meant you had to have the other person's best interest at heart. I learned the hard way that sometimes it didn't matter how much I cared. The other person sometimes had no interest in being challenged. I sought answers to find out why. Sometimes it seemed the other person simply had little or no experience with the sensation. Sometimes I could explain. Sometimes I couldn't.

IMA's website: https://www.imanet.org/International Management Accounting Day: https://www.imanet.org/about-ima/international-management-accounting-dayFULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:00) Welcome back everyone and happy International Management Accounting Day. Each year, IMA celebrates International Management Accounting day on May 6th. This global day of recognition commemorates the important role management accountants play within their organizations. Around the world, finance and accounting professionals work to bring insight and help their organizations realize untapped opportunities and operate more efficiently. While this work happens every day of the year, on May 6th management accountants are publicly recognized by IMA. So to celebrate and support the public recognition, Count Me In has a special bonus episode for you featuring IMA's President and CEO, Jeff Thomson. Jeff spoke with Margaret Michaels, IMA's Manager for Brand Content and Storytelling about the future of finance and accounting. Keep listening to hear them discuss the valuable ongoing efforts of management accountants and the race for relevance in a digital age. Margaret: (01:03) Digital transformation enabled by automation, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies has been the headline story when people talk about the future of finance, but you often bring up the fact that these are really not new technologies. Can you elaborate on that theme and talk a little bit about how the foundational concepts in competing on analytics and other texts laid the groundwork for the transformation we see today? Jeff: (01:41) Sure Margaret. Great question and two related, but somewhat different concepts. So these technologies have been around and developing for some time. Artificial intelligence, has been around for some time, blockchain has been around for some time. But what's different is that all industries have been impacted by these technologies and the applications have been exploding. You know blockchain, for example, the use cases for blockchain were just a few several years ago, but now blockchain use cases have absolutely exploded. You know, blockchain was something we've heard about several years ago, primarily in the financial services industry, but now blockchain applications are permeating many, many industries including education, non-for-profits, and when we think about artificial intelligence, it's not just artificial intelligence in certain industries, it's artificial intelligence in many industries and many applications, so the question is our ability to leverage all of these wonderful uses of these technologies. Now, and then when we think about, RPA robotics process automation, robotics process automation has actually been around for nearly a decade. So when we talk about new technologies, the technologies really aren't that new, but it's the application and comprehensiveness of these technologies across industry verticals that are new. Now, moving to your other question competing on analytics, it's actually the book, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, by Thomas Davenport and Jean Harris. It's actually a book in 2007 that really laid the groundwork for the transformation to data analytics that as you said, we're seeing today. And when you think about it, imagine it was written in 2007 and when you think about the science of winning in the marketplace, what do you think about? You normally think about cool apps, things that consumers see in front of them. Like I said applications, products and services, things you can touch and feel. You don't think about nerdy things like analytics, but if you fast forward today, analytics is the thing we're talking about. Data scientists, data scientists are the number one sought after job because data analytics is how we get to know our consumers and their needs and their wants. They’re how finance team professionals offer insight and foresight to their CEOs, to their boards of directors. So that is the competency and skillset that we as finance team professionals must really aspire to and really accelerate our competencies.   Margaret: (04:59) Great. Now you often say the race for relevance to describe the current iteration of digital transformation in accounting and finance as technology evolves faster than the skills of the people who need to use it. What are the skills finance and accounting professionals need to focus on to keep up and what competencies really stand out to employers in a time when skills are increasingly commoditized?   Jeff: (05:28) Yeah so another great question Margaret you're on a roll today. Yeah, so there's going to be the infamous hard skills and the softer skills, so we are in an absolute environment of disruption. In fact, we often talk about the VUCA world that we're in, and no it's not a Hungarian goulash, it's VUCA volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, VUCA. And we were actually in that environment before COVID-19 tragically struck the world with non-traditional competition, climate, and I can go on and on. So when I think about behavioral characteristics for finance team professionals and CFOs, I think about agility and I know we're going to be talking about agility perhaps in a bit later. I think about adaptability because if you don't have the ability to deal with new situations, stressful situations, totally unexpected situations that your best planning could not have possibly anticipated then you're not going to be able to adjust and deal with the situation from a risk management perspective or a planning perspective. So agility, adaptability, but also being anticipatory. Having that radar at ability to plan the best you can, so from a behavioral perspective, what I call the three A's; agility, adaptability, anticipatory skills. From a harder skills perspective, and again this is for the finance team, strategic planning, strategic thinking and then of course data analytics, data science, everything data, data transformation, digital transformation. Now I don't want to lose sight of the table stakes because as we thinking about the progressive CFO and the CFO of the future, we have to be clear that there are table stakes. There are things that the CFO team must do with excellence that are expected. Things like risk management, internal controls, an ongoing and continuous commitment to ethics, leadership, executive maturity, executive presence, and the like. So we can't lose sight of what got us there and that's a unwavering and relentless focus on, as I said, ethics, internal controls, accurately and fairly representing the financial condition of the enterprise. And then we can offer that insight and foresight and having, enabling the organization to do great things and create great products and services that will change the world.   Margaret: (08:38) That makes a lot of sense and I'm glad you mentioned agility and resilience because COVID has certainly highlighted the need for leaders to help their people become more agile and resilient. How do you define agility and resilience? How equipped are finance and accounting professionals to deal with uncertainty while continuing to innovate and improve processes?   Jeff: (09:04) So agility is, and again, this is a, perhaps a Thomson un-scientific definition, but maybe those are the best. They're not particularly scientific, but agility in my mind, Margaret is the ability to quickly move employees and resources, human resources, and other types of resources, technology resources into new roles or areas of the organization to support changing business needs. And the quickness is really very important because things could change on a dime or a nickel or a penny as the case may be so ability to quickly move employees and other types of resources and the new roles or areas of the organization as conditions change. Resilience or resiliency is perhaps viewed as the physical, social, emotional, and financial wellbeing of employees. Think of it as the shock absorber weathering the storm, hurricane Sandy and the Northeast is a literal interpretation of weathering the storm. COVID-19 around the world and other examples. And when I think about, going back to agility, you know, there's a kind of a company responsibility and a company opportunity to deal with agility, attracting and attaining diverse employees, creating an inclusive culture, identifying employees with digital skills, career pathing, workforce ability offering, and providing technology and communication tools, remote collaboration, but there's also an employee responsibility to improve agility, building your competencies, building skill sets and strategy and data science and data analytics, so it's a dual responsibility when it comes to agility, both an employer and employee responsibility.   Margaret: (11:18) That makes a lot of sense. And as organizations and economies recover from COVID, what do you think the new normal will look like? And what role will management accountants play in helping their organizations recover?   Jeff: (11:34) Well, I think we as a society, Margaret are playing a role in what the new normal will look like. And look, there's no doubt about it, in some sense, tragically COVID-19 impacted lives and livelihoods, closed down small businesses, 3 million deaths, cases, hospitalizations, but the human spirit is strong we learned so much. We learned so much about ourselves, how to cope, learned about how technology can enable, learn so much about how we could deal with tragedy, how we could educate ourselves and lift the human spirit. And we also learned about the new normal of work. So we educated ourselves in so many ways we became a learning society, a world that is transformed forever. So, the new normal in many ways is a new learning world and certainly we've learned that our profession, for example, is one that is a profession that is stronger in many, many ways. It's more, we've invested in new technologies, we've learned that we don't need to be in the office nine to five, we don't all need to be in the office at the same time. We do need to be in the office some of the time, we do need to build and nurture relationships, but you know what, we can close the books remotely, we can create budgets remotely, we can close the books remotely. And so that mix we'll figure out together. We did invest more than we ever have before in data science, we've invested more than ever before in digital transformation across the value chain. Organizations are investing in new hybrid models in terms of remote work, like two-three-two, two days in the office, three days away from the office or in your home office, and then two days of time with the family or other types of models, investing in all types of technologies that enable the consumer to do great things, investing more in ESG to enable the planet to be greener and cleaner. And so, we've learned an awful lot about society ourselves, and our organization. So that is a really, really good thing and I think the new normal will be better than the old normal.   Margaret: (14:28) I agree. I do look forward to a full economic recovery and seeing everybody prosper after such a difficult year.   Jeff: (14:38) I agree, you know, IMA conducts a quarterly global economic survey, as you know, with ACCA, another prominent global accounting association. We've done it for the better part of 60 years. One of the largest quarterly economic surveys of its kind, and there's nothing but optimism in terms of global economic survey. In fact, by the end of this year, we might return to pre-pandemic conditions. You know, if things go well, it's a bit of a race between vaccinations and the variants. We need to be careful and smart in terms of not, you know, going back to relapses and things like that. But if we're smart and cautious, we might see a nice recovery.   Closing: (15:34) This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast providing you with the latest perspectives of thought leaders from the accounting and finance profession. If you like what you heard and you'd like to be counted in for more relevant accounting and finance education, visit IMA's website at www.imanet.org.

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: The value humans bring to AI, guaranteed job programs, and the lack of AI productivity.This week, I sit down with Tom Davenport. Davenport is a professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a senior advisor for Deloitte Analytics. He also pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics.” We talk about how his ideas have evolved since writing the seminal work on that topic, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning; his new book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, which looks at how AI is impacting businesses; and we talk more broadly about how AI is impacting society and what we need to do to keep ourselves on a utopian path.Here are some highlights: How AI will impact jobs In terms of AI impact, there are various schools of thought. Tim O'Reilly's in the very optimistic school. There are other people in the very pessimistic school, thinking that all jobs are going to go away, or 47% of jobs are going to go away, or we'll have rioting in the streets, or our robot overlords will kill us all. I'm kind of in the middle, in the sense that I do think it's not going to be an easy transition for individuals and businesses, and I think we should certainly not be complacent about it and assume the jobs will always be there. But I think it's going to take a lot longer than people usually think to create new business processes and new business models and so on, and that will mean that the jobs will largely continue for long periods. One of my favorite examples is bank tellers. We had about half a million bank tellers in the U.S. in 1980. Along come ATMs and online banking, and so on. You'd think a lot of those tasks would be replaced. We have about half a million bank tellers in the United States in 2016, so... Nobody would recommend it as a growth career, and it is slowly starting to decline, but I think we'll see that in a lot of different areas. And then I think there will be a lot of good jobs working alongside these machines, and that's really the primary focus of our book [Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines] was identifying five ways that humans can add value to the work of smart machines. The appeal of augmentation Think about what is it that humans bring to the party. Automation, in a way, is a kind of a downward spiral. If everybody's automating something in an industry, the prices decline, and margins decline, and innovation is harder because you’ve programmed this system to do things a certain way. So, as a starting assumption, I think augmentation is a much more appealing one for a lot of organizations than, ‘We're going to automate all the jobs away.’ Guaranteed job programs If I were a leader in the United States, I would say the people who are going to need the most help are not so much the knowledge workers who are kind of used to learning new stuff and transforming themselves, to some degree, but the long-distance truck drivers. We have three million in the United States, and I think you'll probably see autonomous trucks on the interstate, maybe in special lanes or something, before we see it in most city, before we see autonomous cars in most cities. That's going to be tougher, because truck drivers probably, as a class, are not that comfortable in transforming themselves by taking courses here and there, and learning the skills they need to learn. So in that case, maybe we will need some guaranteed income programs—or, I'd actually prefer to see guaranteed job programs. There's some evidence that if you have a guaranteed income, you think, ‘Well, maybe they'll take up new sports or artistic pursuits,’ or whatever. Turns out, what most people do when they have a guaranteed income is, they sleep more and they watch TV more, so kind of not good for society in general. Guaranteed job programs worked in the Great Depression for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and artists and writers and so on, so we could do something like that. Whether this country would ever do it is not so clear. The (lacking) economic value of AI In a way, what’s missing in the AI conversation is the same thing I saw missing when I started working in analytics: it's a very technical conversation, for the most part. Not that much yet on how it will change key business and organizational processes—how do we get some productivity out of it? I mean, we desperately need more productivity in this country. We haven't increased it much over the past several years—a great example is health care. We have systems that can read radiological images and say, ‘You need a biopsy, because this looks suspicious,’ in a prostate cancer or breast cancer image, or, ‘This pathology image doesn't look good. You need a further biopsy or something, a more detailed investigation,’ but we haven't really reduced the number of radiologists or pathologists at all, so what's the economic value? We've had these for more than a decade. What's the economic value if we're not creating any more productivity? I think the business and social and political change is going to be a lot harder for us to address than the technical change, and I don't think we're really focusing much on that. I mean, there's no discussion of it in politics, and not yet enough in the business context, either.

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: The value humans bring to AI, guaranteed job programs, and the lack of AI productivity.This week, I sit down with Tom Davenport. Davenport is a professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a senior advisor for Deloitte Analytics. He also pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics.” We talk about how his ideas have evolved since writing the seminal work on that topic, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning; his new book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, which looks at how AI is impacting businesses; and we talk more broadly about how AI is impacting society and what we need to do to keep ourselves on a utopian path.Here are some highlights: How AI will impact jobs In terms of AI impact, there are various schools of thought. Tim O'Reilly's in the very optimistic school. There are other people in the very pessimistic school, thinking that all jobs are going to go away, or 47% of jobs are going to go away, or we'll have rioting in the streets, or our robot overlords will kill us all. I'm kind of in the middle, in the sense that I do think it's not going to be an easy transition for individuals and businesses, and I think we should certainly not be complacent about it and assume the jobs will always be there. But I think it's going to take a lot longer than people usually think to create new business processes and new business models and so on, and that will mean that the jobs will largely continue for long periods. One of my favorite examples is bank tellers. We had about half a million bank tellers in the U.S. in 1980. Along come ATMs and online banking, and so on. You'd think a lot of those tasks would be replaced. We have about half a million bank tellers in the United States in 2016, so... Nobody would recommend it as a growth career, and it is slowly starting to decline, but I think we'll see that in a lot of different areas. And then I think there will be a lot of good jobs working alongside these machines, and that's really the primary focus of our book [Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines] was identifying five ways that humans can add value to the work of smart machines. The appeal of augmentation Think about what is it that humans bring to the party. Automation, in a way, is a kind of a downward spiral. If everybody's automating something in an industry, the prices decline, and margins decline, and innovation is harder because you’ve programmed this system to do things a certain way. So, as a starting assumption, I think augmentation is a much more appealing one for a lot of organizations than, ‘We're going to automate all the jobs away.’ Guaranteed job programs If I were a leader in the United States, I would say the people who are going to need the most help are not so much the knowledge workers who are kind of used to learning new stuff and transforming themselves, to some degree, but the long-distance truck drivers. We have three million in the United States, and I think you'll probably see autonomous trucks on the interstate, maybe in special lanes or something, before we see it in most city, before we see autonomous cars in most cities. That's going to be tougher, because truck drivers probably, as a class, are not that comfortable in transforming themselves by taking courses here and there, and learning the skills they need to learn. So in that case, maybe we will need some guaranteed income programs—or, I'd actually prefer to see guaranteed job programs. There's some evidence that if you have a guaranteed income, you think, ‘Well, maybe they'll take up new sports or artistic pursuits,’ or whatever. Turns out, what most people do when they have a guaranteed income is, they sleep more and they watch TV more, so kind of not good for society in general. Guaranteed job programs worked in the Great Depression for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and artists and writers and so on, so we could do something like that. Whether this country would ever do it is not so clear. The (lacking) economic value of AI In a way, what’s missing in the AI conversation is the same thing I saw missing when I started working in analytics: it's a very technical conversation, for the most part. Not that much yet on how it will change key business and organizational processes—how do we get some productivity out of it? I mean, we desperately need more productivity in this country. We haven't increased it much over the past several years—a great example is health care. We have systems that can read radiological images and say, ‘You need a biopsy, because this looks suspicious,’ in a prostate cancer or breast cancer image, or, ‘This pathology image doesn't look good. You need a further biopsy or something, a more detailed investigation,’ but we haven't really reduced the number of radiologists or pathologists at all, so what's the economic value? We've had these for more than a decade. What's the economic value if we're not creating any more productivity? I think the business and social and political change is going to be a lot harder for us to address than the technical change, and I don't think we're really focusing much on that. I mean, there's no discussion of it in politics, and not yet enough in the business context, either.

A bolt of understanding zapped the business world first in 2006, when Tom Davenport co-authored a Harvard Business Review article about competing on analytics and then in 2007, when Harvard Business Press published “Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning,” the book he co-wrote with Jeanne G. Harris. Since then, the two works have gone onto bestseller status. Prof. Davenport has been named one of the world’s top three analysts of business and technology – listen to his thoughts about operations research, analytics, and his column in the current issue of Analytics in this special podcast.

Tom Davenport and Jeanne Harris, authors of "Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning."