On October 7, the Analytics Club at Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development (SCMHRD) organised its first event for the academic year, Colloquium 2018. This was a panel discussion where eminent speakers and stalwarts from different industries shared a common platform to enlighten the two-year Business Analytics MBA students about the various facets of Data and Business Analytics. The event turned out to be a huge success as it saw enthusiastic participation from both the audience and the panelists.
Utkalika Badu, VP, Quantitative Research, Analytics, Gartner, moderated the first panel discussion and the topic — ‘Future of Analytics in the next five years’ — was intriguing and interesting for both audience and panelists. The discussion started with how data and analytics have impacted the lives of the common man in recent years due to huge silos of data being generated everyday. Badu drove the discussion towards technologies that are used to collect and refine data to make it usable for gaining insights, and how such tech will likely evolve in the future.
Varun Rajwade, GM, Loyalty & Analytics at Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail Ltd, said analytics could be classified as having both depth and width. He shared his experience of dealing with analysts in his team, who use analytics to predict sales and customer experience as the retail industry is more focused on ‘consumer needs’ than anything else.
Predictive tech
Nimilita Chatterjee, Senior VP, Data Analytics, Equifax, spoke of how the company uses predictive analytics to deduce insights from a repository of 400 million records of customer who had taken loans.
Gunjan Gupta, Senior VP & Head, Analytics, at Bajaj Allianz Life Insurance, spoke about how customers are increasingly becoming aware of healthy lifestyles through adoption of technical gadgets/wearables like FitBit which, in a way, helps them become more aware about the person who is taking an insurance.
Srinath Jangam, Global Head, Advance Analytics, L&T Construction Inc, carried forward the same idea, saying there would come a time when technology and analytics would be able to predict heart attacks.
All the panelists were of the opinion that India was a laggard in analytics and that there is tremendous scope to improve and adapt to changes. The panelists brought up daily challenges they face in their respective domains. The discussion ended with questions from the audience, that were logically answered by the panelists.
Legal boundaries
The second half of the panel discussion was about ‘Data Privacy and Analytics: Setting Legal Boundaries for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence’, moderated by Prashant Kumar, Manager at Deloitte. He opened the panel by saying that data leaks and data privacy are growing concerns in the Indian context.
Vivek Shrivastava, Consulting Partner at Deloitte, said Facebook is a platform where data is readily available and, hence, often misused, especially by the younger generation. He shared his personal experience about how data is shared among tele-callers and agents due to which one is bugged with numerous calls for credit card or car insurance offers.
Puneet Sharma, Lead Analyst at The Boston Consulting Group brought forward the topic of Aadhar data leaks, and how they are a kind of identity theft.
Badu pointed out that sharing of confidential data and information with third parties could lead to breach of privacy.
The discussion concluded with the notion that data security is a global challenge that all industries face and can be regulated only by strict regulations and stringent laws. Both the discussions provided the audience with a whole new way to look at data analytics, as summed up by Utkalika: “Analytics has woven many dreams into the minds of people, but in reality it’s a lot more difficult to deal with”.