A Written Analysis on Data Science at Target

Desai has done a good job at integrating Data Science in Target from the ground up. He was able to see
the silver lining during an economic crisis at the time. He saw the ecommerce arm of Target as a window
of opportunity to boost the performance of the company in terms of its sales. The idea in itself was a great
risk because in times of economic crisis, starting a new project that involves altering and building around
the whole enterprise can have detrimental effects if not successful. However, the executives have put trust
into Desai in managing this project because they believe in Desai’s vision for the company. That vision was
to make Target a data-driven company.

Desai’s first job was the most important one. The job was to build a strong foundation for his data strategy.
He focused on data science applications, business insights and reporting, data architecture, management,
and governance, and, last but not the least, experiment design and testing. These are the pillars to his data
strategy. For him to accomplish this, he built a team: a team that specializes in these pillars. It consists of
data engineers, data scientists and business analysts. I think he made a good decision to establish equal
footing amongst the team members. All of them had equal stakes on the projects, but of course Desai was
the decision maker of the team. Desai acknowledged that to be able to succeed in accomplishing the
objective, members of the team should not worry whether their opinions are less valid than the others’. All
members of the team had equal say to a certain issue and that is why his team was working to the best of
its capacity. Desai fostered a culture of entrepreneurship which I think is a great decision because data
science is new to the company and committing mistakes should not be seen as a failure but rather an
opportunity of improvement. He taught them to think algorithmically by formulating a develop-test-measure
iterative process in conducting experiments. This brought into light the importance of having performance
metrics and how these would facilitate action.

Desai and his team were able to see improvements after countless iterative experimentation on the
ecommerce arm of Target. They had used machine learning methods to predict customer purchase
behavior and worked on that with the objective to make the customer purchase and come back again to
purchase for more again and again. After reaping the fruits of their labor in the Target.com website, Desai
was able to show how impactful the data-driven approach was to the business. The next step for Desai is
to integrate what they have learned from the ecommerce project and transform how the whole entirety of
Target as an enterprise would leverage on data. This posed as the toughest challenge yet for Desai and
his team. They started building important relationships with the analysts and managers across several
business units. This is crucial because these people know the nuances in the business units that they
belong to. This allowed EDABI along with the analysts and managers to ask the right questions that would
entail an achievable and concrete solution. This is where having an entrepreneurial mindset comes into
play. EDABI needed to speak the language of business to effectively coordinate with the other business
units. EDABI did not expect these units to understand the very technical terms that they were using for data
science and analytics.

The reading has enlightened me on the requirements, risks, and processes that involve in introducing data
science into a non-data native organization. There should be a solid business case that would appropriate
the integration of data science with the rest of the organization. Acknowledging the risks involved and
knowing what steps to take to manage these come with introducing something new to an organization. One
should know the “blueprints” on how to structure the project that will be implemented. In this regard, it is
vital that one must have an understanding of the state of the organization: acknowledging existing structure,
roles, and people. Being able to speak the language of business is also a crucial part because you will be
coordinating with people outside your team who may not know the technical language that you are speaking
with your team. Lastly, the most important is focusing on strategic imperatives. If everything seems to going
downhill, taking a step back and reviewing the strategic imperatives will be able to make things a lot clearer
and it will help the teams be redirected to the right direction.