Are you a Data Science hero — aka BADIRist?

One of my colleagues is a big fan of detective stories and Sherlock Holmes. One day we started talking about Sherlock and what it would look like if Sherlock transitioned his career to become an analyst or data scientist? He wondered if Sherlock would be a BADIRist? I definitely think so.

Sherlock used something similar to BADIR™ to solve crimes, though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t know of the term back then. I’ll tell you why I believe this to be true, but first, let me tell you about BADIR.

These days huge amounts of data — “Big Data” — overwhelm business professionals, often making it nearly impossible to parse what information is relevant and actionable for the business, and what is merely interesting, perhaps even worth knowing, but ultimately irrelevant to business decision-making.

When you are trying to tackle a problem for your business, do you know what questions to ask? Do you know how to arrive at answers QUICKLY that will empower you to act? Do you know how to evaluate your actions?

BADIR, Aryng’s Data to Decisions™ framework is a recipe to allow you to do just that.

The five-step process takes you from determining what questions to ask, through the design of your analysis, the collection of data, and data analysis, all the way to recommendations for actions to help drive impact on your business.

Here are the five steps:

· Clarify the Business question. As the famous inventor Charles ‘Boss’ Kettering said, “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.” BADIR’s Business Question framework gives the ability to get to the real question. What exactly are we trying to solve?

· Layout a hypotheses-driven Analytics plan. Plan before you do and make sure all the key stakeholders agree with your plan. A hypothesis-driven approach enables accelerated discovery of insights towards the problem at hand.

· Pull relevant Data. BADIR propounds using hypotheses driven plan to winnow down the exact data needed to answer the question, instead of looking at all the data available. This leads to the fastest insights possible

· Convert data to Insights. BADIR has an exact recipe to follow for every methodology you will use, with clear guidelines on which methodology to use for what kind of problem. The insights recipe leads to accurate execution of analytics and the fastest results with early check-ins with stake-holders, priming them for action.

· Make Recommendations to drive impact. How you say it is important too! With BADIR, we have the exact science to make winning presentations loaded with actionable recommendations that drive $s and impact.

Now back to Sherlock Holmes and how he was a BADIRIST? Sherlock had a unique way of interrogating; he would ask questions that nobody deemed relevant. But he wanted to know about the motives of every person he questioned. Asking relevant questions is built into BADIR so that anybody can get to the real business question.

Sherlock Holmes was also so successful at solving crimes because he followed a hypothesis-driven approach like BADIR. The time he spent playing cacophonous music, much to the annoyance of Dr. Watson, was often his way of percolating relevant hypotheses. Once he had the hypotheses, he would collect relevant data to prove or disprove them.

He had spent countless hours practicing his investigation of dead bodies to build his recipe of association, e.g. “when this happens, this is most probably the cause. Again, this exact skillset is built into BADIR, which clearly defines what methodology to follow when and the follow-on recipe to get to the bottom of the hypothesis.

We all know of how he told about the crimes he solved highlighting his hypothesis-driven approach and structured process of following clues.

Analytics is much like that. Businesses are looking for meaningful insights to solve yet another mystery about products, customers and how products are being consumed by their customers.

Can you imagine what would happen if each and every Analytics project was solved by Sherlock Holmes? I can imagine billions of dollars being saved or generated within a company.

And armed with the BADIR framework, the fictional character of Holmes comes alive in you!

Are you a BADIRist? If not, here is your invitation to become one. Aryng’s complete career transition to Data Science track helps you evaluate whether this career is a fit for you and then guides you through a systematic approach to landing your dream job. To begin your journey, assess your fit for analytics by taking Aryng’s analytics aptitude test.

We still have some scholarship slots open for this year and if you score well, you would receive an invitation to join the program with the significant scholarship.