OR55 Plenary - Analytical Revolution (PDF)

Abstract

Incorporating predictive technologies with roots in Artificial Intelligence, statistics and database research, advance analytics has progressed over the course of the last twenty five years from an area of academic research, to a leading-edge capability brought in to businesses by visionary early adopters, to its position today as a competitive necessity. However, there has remained a perception that a limiting factor is the availability of highly-trained individuals with deep analytical skills. The huge interest in Big Data, bringing with it the emergence of the “data scientist” role, has reinforced the impression that the discipline is bottlenecked on the availability of highly skilled – and very expensive – specialists who hand-craft and refine each and every predictive model.