How AI is Changing Business (And Ways the C-Suite Can Prepare)
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In this #DataTalk, we talked with Dr. Sam Ransbotham, an associate professor of information systems at Boston College and the MIT Sloan Management Review Guest Editor for the Data and Analytics Big Idea Initiative.
Mike Delgado: Hello, and welcome to Experian’s Weekly Data Talk, a show featuring some of the smartest people working in data science today. Today we’re talking with Dr. Sam Ransbotham — I know I probably messed it up already. He’s an associate professor of information systems at Boston College. He’s also the guest editor for MIT Sloan Management Review. Sam earned his Ph.D. in information systems at Georgia Institute of Technology. He also got his Master of Science in management and his MBA from Georgia Institute of Technology, and he did his undergraduate work in chemical engineering. Fascinating background. Sam, thank you so much for being our guest today.
Sam Ransbotham: I love to be here. It’s fun stuff. Mike Delgado: Could you take us through your academic journey, from your interest in data science to now being a thought leader and helping companies, as well as helping your students, understand how to use data and making it useful for business? Sam Ransbotham: You’ve already intimidated me. You’ve used some of the smartest people and you said thought leader. No, I mean, I think this stuff is fun. You noted a couple of things in my background. I’ve got years of organic chemistry that I completely wasted. I don’t know what I was doing with that. What I found from that process is that what I really liked was the use of technologies to understand how things were happening. Whether it’s simulation in a chemical plant, which I really got more into than the actual chemistry, to understanding that we can model all sorts of things. And that’s kind of the journey to where I am at this particular point.
When we talk about “how did I get to this point?” — my actual Ph.D., my dissertation was using security data. With security data, you think about the security logs that are happening. They’re just millions, billions of records coming in all the time that people are monitoring.
And I got fascinated by trying to figure out what was going on in there. If you think about it as a giant haystack, there’s a whole lot of hay in that haystack. Lots of innocuous behavior, lots of normal good traffic. But buried in there are some really sharp needles. So I got pretty fascinated by, “Well, if I’ve got all this data, what am I going to do with it? How do I start to figure it out?” And that’s where I got started with, “Hey, some of these tools actually can be useful there and useful all over the place.” I got sucked in. It happens.
Mike Delgado: I like your illustration of big data as finding those needles in a haystack. I think it’s a really good one, because what’s really difficult is taking the amount of data that businesses collect and trying to find the right data that’s actually actionable. I heard an illustration last week … Instead of the haystack illustration, it’s like the Where’s Waldo books. Because you have all these different figures going on, and where is Waldo actually at? That’s the actionable stuff. It’ really funny hearing about your undergraduate work that led into your work with data science and information systems.
