Pushon Mukherjee is a member of:
- Expert
Pushon Mukherjee's Advice
Be flexible with whatever comes your way
The simplest advice would be to come in with an open mind. Analytics is not a science, it is a way of thinking. People often mistake it with statistics and econometric modeling but analytics is more than that. An excellent report that accurately captures the business scenario with basic data analysis is more valuable than the most advanced model that can be built to predict consumer behavior. Be flexible with whatever comes your way and never wait for the perfect data to perform the perfect analysis. Make do with what you have at your disposal.
Latest Trends
The three most important trends in the technology space happening today are cloud, big data and unstructured analysis. And analytics has a tremendous role to play in each of these sectors. The focus should be more on application of analytical techniques than on the theory itself.
Advice
The simplest advice would be to come in with an open mind. Analytics is not a science, it is a way of thinking. People often mistake it with statistics and econometric modeling but analytics is more than that. An excellent report that accurately captures the business scenario with basic data analysis is more valuable than the most advanced model that can be built to predict consumer behavior. Be flexible with whatever comes your way and never wait for the perfect data to perform the perfect analysis. Make do with what you have at your disposal.
Recommended
One should have a good grasp of some basic techniques - regression (OLS/logistic), forecasting, segmentation (subjective/objective) and hypotheses testing. Having knowledge of tools and platforms like R, SAS, Hadoop, UNIX and VBA programming would help but can always be picked up on the job. Any new technology or technique that comes up will be some variant of these and if one has the first principles in place it should not be difficult to understand and apply them to the job.
Book/Website that you recommend
There are a lot of books these days but the best education comes on the job. For a good start, one can read "Competing on Analytics" by Thomas H. Davenport to understand about the domain from a strategic perspective.
Career Decisions
The biggest decision was to join the analytics industry! Way back in 2002, it was still a nascent domain with only a couple of players in the market. So when I was offered a job at the analytics COE of GE, I was a bit hesitant to join given my specialization in Economics and MBA in Finance. But, looking back, it was a good decision. The second big decision was to change the vertical I spent the first 5 years working on the financial domain esp. around credit cards and retail banking. But consumer products was slowly becoming a big industry for analytics and that's when I decided to shift over to the products domain from a services domain. Even though the data availability is a big challenge in the products industry, the real kick lies in devising analytical strategies for business scenarios without much data.