Using data analytics can sharpen your business edge and open up new opportunities, says Mr Gerald Yong (pictured above). The professional services manager at SoftSource Solutions underwent a training stint last year at the EMC Centre of Attachment to hone his big data and analytics skills. The  programme  provides expert-level training for job roles such as Cloud Architect and Data Scientist. Mr Yong shares his insights on this emerging field.

What makes data analytics an interesting field for infocomm professionals like yourself?
It’s a challenging area because it opens up many new possibilities for businesses, improving the way we work and how we look at things in various domains. Just by examining the data and running certain algorithms, you can gain new insights. Personally, when I went to places like Amazon.com, I often wondered how they figured out things like the buying preferences of customers and how they seemed to know certain things about you that you may not have realised yourself. So it’s an interesting field that involves both science and understanding people.

How is data analytics relevant to the work that you do at SoftSource Solutions?
Our customers have a lot of data such as sales reports, product data, transactions, text documents and even social media data such as twitter feeds. We help them process this varied information to provide meaningful business insights. Different customers have different needs so we find the best methods and algorithms to suit their individual needs.

Tell us about your experiences at the EMC Centre of Attachment.
I signed up with the programme last year because I was quite new to this field, and I wanted to get up to speed quickly. The classroom lessons lasted about six weeks and it was pretty intense to say the least. This was followed by an attachment programme which was quite an eye-opener.

I’m still working on a project looking at text analytics – examining who are the people writing a particular document, what do they write about, does it change over time or change with a different audience, the mood and motivations of the writer and how they may pitch a certain product or service. So it does go quite far beyond just looking at the numbers.

What were some of the key lessons that you learnt from the programme?
One of the key takeaways is that we often tend to underestimate the complexity of the issues involved until we get deeper into it and then we realise that there are many other factors to consider.

I feel that going forward, data analytics will be a key component of IT and play a bigger role in how companies operate. The programme gave me a good overview of what this industry is like, the tools available, and a good grounding for acquiring new knowledge. I definitely feel that I can now contribute more to the team.

Did the course give you a more regional/global feel of how the science of data analytics is being applied in other countries?
The course does cover some aspects of how data analytics is used in other places. Overseas, insofar as data analytics is concerned, things have progressed a lot and it is now simply a part of the overall business processes. In Singapore, quite a number of firms are still relying on Excel spreadsheets and such. They are not really thinking in terms of analytics, so more exposure into this field is necessary for them to realise its potential for taking their companies to a new level. We still have quite a way to go to change this business mindset towards the value and potential of data analytics.

What advice would you offer to those thinking of entering the data analytics field?
You will need to have the interest and a statistics background would certainly help. Definitely it’s not easy especially when you are starting off. I myself am not a very “maths” person so it was hard at the start, but the good thing is that most of the time, you don’t have to worry too much about how algorithms are put together because that is done by other people. What you need to know is how to apply them and be aware of their limitations and accuracy.

What survival tips can you offer to those already in the data analytics field?
It’s a very dynamic field so you need to keep yourself updated all the time. Things are always changing and there are constantly new methods being developed on how you can look at things.