Theresa Kushner – Partner in Business Data Leadership, & former Sr. VP of Dell

The famous management consultant W. Edwards Deming once said “In God we trust, all others bring data.” Enterprises embracing digital transformation are bringing that data in droves, and cultivating it in ways unimaginable even just a few short years ago. Thanks to new tools, techniques, and technological advances, massive volumes of historical & real-time data can be analyzed to make forecasts about future events. This field of “predictive analytics” has enormous implications for everyone. For IT professionals, it offers a chance to not only anticipate problems before they occur, but to automate their mitigation before they materialize. Predictive analytics seems like the modern day equivalent of a crystal ball, but with data scientists and statisticians divining the future instead of fortune tellers. To get us up to speed on the state of predictive analytics today, we turn to one of its most notable thought leaders, Theresa Kushner, recent inductee into the Analytics Hall of Fame. Having managed huge analytics projects for Dell, Cisco, VMWare & IBM, Theresa knows what it takes to convert data into ROI-generating predictions. In this episode, she’ll share with us some of the unexpected ways predictive analytics can be used, how a new occupation called "Business Scientist" might be the key to alleviating the drastic shortage of data scientists, and what the single most unrealistic expectation is plaguing the field of predictive analytics.