Over the years, a significant shift has happened towards government initiative for digitization. Currently, different ministries and government departments are at different stages of digitization and gradually use of data analytics tools are increasing. Companies like Teradata are actively trying to explore the Indian market. In an interview with Mohd Ujaley, Souma Das, Managing Director, Teradata India says, “Our India business is growing. We are seeing good traction for our solutions. We have built the foundation with various organizations. Now, we are focusing on finance, manufacturing and government sectors along with others.”
What is your general overview of the use of data analytics in India?
In the last couple of years, a significant shift has happened in terms of governments initiatives towards digitization. With digitization, I mean you are not just digitizing your systems and records and data but you are also digitizing to ensure that you are able to integrate different businesses and different government functions to be able to take an informed decision. When you create an integrable architecture, that becomes a building block for driving insight from data and that is where analytics play a significant role.
In India, different ministries and different government departments are at different stages. Some of the things that are driving the government push towards digitization and organizations zeal to extract actionable insight from data to improve citizen service, minimize fraudulent activity, raise tax collection. Also, the government is looking to use data analytics to channelize different welfare programs for lower strata of society to bring them at par with the mainstream.
Is the data itself is the end or do the holders of the data have to ask the right questions?
It doesn’t matter how much data you have got if you are not actually extracting something out of it. It is not worth anything. While a lot of organizations have spent a lot of time building large data infrastructure but now they need to increase their ability to ask more questions. This can be done with the help of analytics. The newer technologies are not changing the concepts, they are giving the ability to see something in the data and to process a large volume of data to get desired results. With the newer technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence, our ability to visualize and look for patterns or change in the patterns have increased like never before.
But I must add that there can be lots of data but not all data would be relevant. So, it is also very important to figure out which is the data that an organization really need because processing and capturing data adds cost to the balance sheet.
That brings to a very important question that you have asked about the ability to ask the right question to get the right answer. For that organization needs to design their inter-data model based on the all probable questions. It will lead them to an inference that can give them the right answers.
On one side, we have advanced technology for data analytics and on the other hand, there is a shortage of data scientist. How could this gap be balanced?
Yes, you are right. Data scientists are needed to give us strong capability in the field of data analytics but they cannot do all the things themselves, that is why we need to empower engineers who may not be technically data scientist but with modern toolsets, they can look at the data to visualize. In this way, we actually end up breaking the workload.
How is your India business doing?
Our India business is doing great. We are seeing good traction for our solutions. We have built the foundation with various organizations. We are focusing on finance, manufacturing and government sectors along with others.