2017-2018 exchange Jan Feb 2018 Newsletter FINAL | Page 16

Meet the Author
Bill Stolte is a Corporate
Vice President at New York
Life Insurance Company
where he focuses on data
governance
Are you able to define the difference between all the “IT” terms
used to describe the techniques and technologies that use data
to solve business problems? A common list of terms often used in
this context includes “reporting”, “business intelligence”, “analytics”,
“predictive modeling”, “data science”, “informatics”, “econometrics”,
“cognitive computing”, “machine learning”, and much more. While it
would even be challenging for some IT professionals to provide clear
definitions for all these terms, its fair to say that most business pro-
fessionals’ eyes may gloss over trying to understand what all this
means.
Perhaps a gross oversimplification, but all these techniques and
classes of technology and tools are really singularly focused on
one thing…. answering questions via data. Organizations that em-
brace this simplicity and focus on pursuing answers to the most pow-
erful and relevant questions for their business are generally the ones
that yield the most value from these analytical techniques. The key is
focusing on the right questions by nurturing the right talent to develop
a pipeline of powerful questions.
To simplify the premise, many people try to differentiate between
reporting and analytics, declaring that these are separate things,
hinting that reporting is rather mundane and outdated while ana-
lytics is trendy, classy and sophisticated. The reality is that both
techniques have similar intentions, to use data to provide answers to
a business questions. While analytics is a broader term, the differ-
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