Inspiration
We are standing on the shoulders of giants. The following quotes will give you a flavour of the philosophy underpinning Eichen Lernen (oaks learning)’s training, programming and consulting services. As John K. Thompson wrote in his 2020 book “Building Analytics Teams” page 77) we want to increase data literacy in organizations.
Inspirational quotes
John K. Thompson in his 2020 book “Building Analytics Teams”:
“I travelled to every continent and spent much of my times on the road and in discussions with executives, managers and people who should be involved. The primary objectives of those meetings were to: […] - Let them know that we were not there to judge their ideas and current state of operating, but to help them see how data and analytics will help them reach and exceed their operating goals. - Improve employee engagement and remove the tedious parts of staff members’ duties to enable those staff members to focus on the more creative aspects of their work that leverages their experience and expertise.
John K. Thompson again in a 2025 Interview (40 minutes into the interview):
“You can intergrate data into these vectors and ensembles, you can predict things that only you understand. So this whole Idea that AI is beyond us, it’s out there that someone else does it, it’s beyond what we can do. That’s not true. AI is for everybody. You know we have lots and lots of models, we have thousands of models. Make them your own! The real differentiation for AI is data. The algorithms are important. The algorithms are usefull and all these different things are helpfull, but if you want to make a difference in your business, you can, it really comes down to how you look at your data and how you turn it into an asset that is actionable.”
There is a critique of the “no code” approaches to creating data science software. Think about the analogy with a word processor. You don’t write an article or a report by choosing every word in a drop down menu.
Matt Turck in Conversation with Florian Douetteau, CEO, Dataiku:
“Data and AI in the enterprise is mostly not about a magical product, or a flying machine driven by AI. It’s mostly about the business processes, probably hundreds of them that you have inside the company. Most companies operate like a clockwork, meaning you’ve got many, many business processes that work together in order to create value. Possibly for any decent-sized company, 500-1000 of them. And data and AI is mostly about optimizing each of them step-by-step to make them more efficient, and more automated. And that’s why it’s so hard, it’s because data and AI in the enterprise is mostly about this very long transformation that most enterprises will have to go through. It’s probably a 20-25 year journey, and we are one third into it. And at the end of the journey, you have completely new way to work, with data and AI being very pervasive.”
https://mattturck.com/saas-dead/
“for the more specialized enterprise apps, customers feel like they can/should “build” internally rather than “buy” ”