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Learn the Business

To be effective, data scientists should learn all they can about the company or agency that
employs them, including its customers, products, and services; the overall industry, including
major partners and competitors; and management’s vision for the future. Some companies
provide good orientation programs for new employees. Even so, learning the business is a
lifelong proposition. There are many ways to learn about a business – here are some options.

The Annual Report
A good place to start is the company’s annual report. The document is usually prepared
with shareholders and capital market analysts in mind, yet it can be also informative for
data scientists. The management introduction describes the company’s vision, its short‐ and
long‐term goals, what it accomplished in the past year, and where it is headed in the next few.
Annual reports can produce some important surprises. As an example, can you guess Steve
Job’s original vision for Apple?
Answer: While reading a Scientific American article on the relative efficiency of animals,
Steve Jobs was struck by how ordinary human beings are. For example, we are in the middle
of the pack in converting energy to speed. But put a human on a bicycle, and the human far
exceeds the efficiency of any animal. Steve’s vision was for Apple to become a “bicycle for the
mind.” This vision drove its product and service line roadmap.
While many missions and visions are quite pedestrian, for some organizations they serve as
a unifying principle and raison d’être and drive various strategic initiatives.

SWOTs and Strategic Analysis

A classical approach to evaluate a business or any organization is to list its strengths, weak-
nesses, opportunities, and threats, i.e. SWOT. In such a mapping, strengths and weaknesses
represent an inward look and opportunities and threats represent the outside landscape. An
infinite number of management meetings have been dedicated to SWOT analyses. Studying an
organizational SWOT is an excellent way to learn about a company (Kenett and Baker 2010).

The Real Work of Data Science: Turning Data into Information, Better Decisions, and Stronger Organizations,
First Edition. Ron S. Kenett and Thomas C. Redman.
© 2019 Ron S. Kenett and Thomas C. Redman. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Companion website: www.wiley.com/go/kenett-redman/datascience