Are data scientists doing the right thing?

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There’s good and bad news for today’s data scientists. The good news is that you’re doing a great job, giving your organizations crucial business insights. The bad news is that sometimes it’s not enough to truly make a difference, to push your company efficiently and effectively into the premier league. Feeding data into PowerPoints, spreadsheets and dashboards is only the first step in helping to make the right business decisions. What comes next is actually showing which decision will have the best possible outcome. In other words: data-driven decision optimization. And now this is easier than ever, with cloud-based prescriptive analytics on the Data Science Experience platform. Let me explain a little further.

Say your company wants to run a marketing campaign for a new product. It uses predictive analytics to determine which of its customers will most likely be interested in the proposition and should be contacted. But what’s the most cost effective way to do this? With prescriptive analytics you can answer that very important question. It recommends how to achieve maximum expected revenue from the campaign at minimum cost – from the best advertising channel for a specific product and the perfect timing, down to the level of individual customers.

Another example is price optimization. Predictive analytics gives you insights into the relationship between a product’s price and its sales, but what you really need to offer to your client is the price for each product that will generate maximum total revenue – and that’s where prescriptive analytics comes in. There are plenty more examples of applying decision optimization in all kinds of industries. Hospitals optimizing doctors’ and nurses’ work schedules, banks optimizing ATM replenishment, manufacturing plants optimizing their supply chains and product delivery… The real power lies in integrating predictive analytics with prescriptive analytics,

and the possibilities are endless.

So instead of overwhelming the decision-makers in your company with predictions, leaving them with difficult choices and unknown consequences, start offering them the actionable insights they need to do the right thing. This is easily achieved on the IBM Data Science Experience or, as we call it, DSx platform. This powerful platform for data scientists already enabled predictive analytics with tools like R and Python (and soon with IBM Watson Machine Learning), but now prescriptive analytics has been added, with IBM Decision Optimization on Cloud. Based on the proven CPLEX tool, this cloud solution for optimizing business decisions seamlessly lets you integrate the predictive models you developed on the DSx platform, with clever prescriptive models.

All you have to do is register, collect a key and then you can use IBM Decision on Cloud fully in your Data Experience notebook. It’s as simple as that, to help your company optimize its decisions.

Is that good news or what?

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