Analytics in the driver’s seat at Ford
Ford Motor Co. was the first to create a moving automobile assembly line and the first to make cars affordable to the masses. No wonder it’s an American icon. Founder Henry Ford was a pioneer and an innovator, a tradition still carried on today: In 2014, Ford was the first major automaker to appoint a chief data and analytics officer.
Paul Ballew leads Ford’s global data and analytics teams, which includes the development of new capabilities for connectivity and smart mobility, and projects involving vehicle-to-vehicle communications and the development of autonomous vehicles. Those initiatives are just one part of Ballew’s busy schedule, but he made time recently for a conversation about the company’s approach to analytics.
Ballew: We’re leveraging data and analytics on both sides of our business model. We’re addressing the fundamentals, which include infrastructure, data management, and the integration of those assets with the analytics community. Business adoption of analytics – and integration and embedding analytics with business partners – is important.
Another thing we’re focusing a lot of time and attention on is what’s behind the next corner, as we’re all trying to provide greater precision and timeliness in our insights. There’s a lot of buzz in the industry – everyone wanting to talk deep learning, alternative analytic methods, unstructured data. But for us, it’s more about where does the journey take us in terms of deriving business value.
Ballew: When you talk about IoT, that’s a subset of a lot of things we are doing in manufacturing and connected vehicles. For example, we’re working with Amazon and the IoT platform Wink to grant Ford owners access to their connected-home devices from their cars through Ford SYNC.
Voice commands issued at home through Amazon Echo would allow Ford owners to remotely lock their vehicles, program a time to start the engine, or check fuel levels. And from your car, you could adjust lights, change your thermostat setting and access any other home system connected to the IoT – all from behind the wheel.
Ballew: This to me is the biggest question of all – how do you achieve business value, and how are you integrating yourself with the business partners?
Our approach since day one has been not only to embed resources, but to take it to the next level by working together with our business partners to continuously understand their issues, and bringing them through our problem formulation activities.
We view ourselves as internal consultants, and any good consultant has to understand the customer and the opportunity and then work with the customer through adoption, measurement and tracking, and assessing on the back end, from a continuous learning standpoint.
