From CIO: Convergint builds data science team from the ground up

Leveraging data science skills and leveraging machine learning techniques can give companies an advantage. The global services-based systems integrator Convergint hired Bhuvana Badrinathan to serve as its first CIO and leverage AI for sales forecasting. When Badrinathan joined, there were no data scientists or a formal data team. Convergint needed to increase its data capabilities and needed a new ERP system to support a host of customer-facing applications. Convergint struggled to build executable models because they did not have adequate resources for the upfront data analysis required.

Badrinathan’s passion is to make Convergint a business that makes data-driven decisions. Everyone at Convergint needed access to verified and validated data and Power BI dashboards to make data-driven decisions. Data democratization is a challenging task, but Badrinathan said that she prioritized hiring a data scientist to guide the company through that process. After hiring a data scientist, it took a long time to put together a POC and operationalize the data.

dotData’s dotData Enterprise platform has helped Convergint automate its data science process, enabling the company to build more accurate forecasting models. Badrinathan says it used to take months to answer questions about data, but now it takes days. Badrinathan says the data analytics transformation is already paying dividends and is helping the company predict revenue.

Read more about Convergint’s AI journey at CIO magazine. Then come back and learn more about dotData Enterprise.