John Wubbel

My Pride and Joy has been working within business environments to maintain improve or

optimize performance and profitability. The basic accounting tool, Full-time Equivalent (FTE) as the mechanism for human resource utilization, planning, budgeting and resource allocations in organizations is the abstraction derived from sets of key performance indicators. Metrics, the life blood data streams of any organized projects that add value, has been the focal point as business software engineering has been put into practice throughout my career.

Unrealized value from or non-recognition of data assets utilization particularly in today's world and from my own empirical experience has to do with a knowledge gap between highly skilled technicians that develop and deploy solutions and decision makers having the keen business acuity to want a digital strategy yet lack the vision of a pathway to achieve the goal. Thus, it is common to struggle to comprehend complex solutions and resulting benefits in order to justify an investment. A wide open span between the bridge piers is both a communications issue as well as something hard to quantify in terms of benefit or FTE, especially prior to implementation, say for example the development and use of a statistical multivariate model and the resulting outputs.

No group is to blame for the gap because it is a consequence of people taking different career tracks and differing major fields of study. No one realistically can expect a data scientist or an MBA to do one or the others job. JMP CONNECTIONS is an effort to bridge the gap. It is very challenging to solve, to write about it, however a book can ease the difficulty between the desire of business planners to realize a digital strategy and a data scientist that also desires to transform data into knowledge assets for use in producing advanced analytics as both goals are complementary of the other.

The writing approach is to ask the business owner or executive to read the first half of the book and then hand the second half off to their technical people. The practical matters up front about data and related maturity or capability is easy to understand yet precludes out of necessity what the technical personnel need in order to do such things as classical statistical analytics, process monitoring, reporting out key performance indicators or conducting data science on a smart data lake with the idea that automating the production of metrics serves the two fold advantage of reducing FTEs while supporting optimal business decision making processes. While the business software discipline and engineering principles are well established, the one variable that can always be a ringer is the social aspects and interactions of organizations. It is my hope that using JMP to see and share the connections that exist in your data, your business can more easily bring the diversity that people bring across disciplines together to achieve great results for both you and your customers.