The Sentient Enterprise

Introduction

This is a book about business technology and business culture. Specifically, it’s about how the right combination of technology and culture can transform the use of data and analytics so that even the largest organizations achieve new found levels of agility, insight, and value from their information sources.

This book is also written for a very wide range of business professionals. By that we mean not just senior technology executives and data scientists, but also business users, anyone who might have “analyst” in the job title, and pretty much everyone whose role is impacted by how data is gathered, analyzed and applied in the organization.

Whether you’re establishing the next-generation digital strategy, setting up data experiments to explore deep neural networks, or establishing controls for access to your corporate KPI dashboard, this book is for you. Our goal is to build bridges across job functions and departmental silos to solve common challenges that most business professionals will recognize—challenges such as:

“How can we stop multiple teams from pulling information into their own data silos and then spending all our meeting time wondering why everyone’s data doesn’t match up?”

—Data scientist at a major auto manufacturer

“Just because we’re big doesn’t automatically mean we’re the best; what’s the best way to leverage our economy of scale while remaining agile?”

—Chief data officer for a telecommunications giant

“Why is it that my kids at home have ...