Alix Schmidt & Amanda Ahrens @ Dow | Creating business value with community | Data Science Hangout
We were recently joined by Amanda Ahrens & Alix Schmidt from Dow Chemical to discuss designing enterprise data architecture to enable sustainability, how data science is really all about the people, and about leading a data science community of over 500 researchers at Dow.
At 10:02 in the recording, Alix and Amanda shared that one of their executive leaders at Dow asked, “How can we use this community to start creating value for the company?”
They suggested, why don't you go figure out how to do a hackathon? That word can mean a lot of things to a lot of people but after really talking about it, we settled on this sort of Shark Tank- like the TV show Shark Tank - style thing where groups come up with a project idea and pitch it to this executive panel.
How did you go from that one executive sponsor to a panel of eight executives in the first challenge?
What really works is having the executive that's already onboard sell it to the rest. It doesn't work so much if you're out there by yourself. If you can go along with that executive that's already on board and explain the vision of why you want to do a Data Science Challenge or a Data Science Conference and what's in it for them - it’s a lot easier to get them to say yes.
They felt like it was an opportunity the other executive was giving them to really help set the data science direction for the company.
In all three Data Science Challenges, winning projects were implemented in some way.
Even if they weren't funded directly initially, there was such high interest by the executives in moving forward with the idea.
The number one project from last year actually just won an Edison Award, which is a big research and development in STEM award. That's external recognition too!
With that project, pieces of it were happening already, but a lot of value is created at the interface of different functions and different organizations in a company as big as Dow, which is like 37,000 employees.
One of the things we encourage folks to do is network and get out there and find people in parts of the company that you wouldn't normally talk to.
That project brought three very small projects from our toxicology department, our molecular discovery research area, and our supply chain area together to make a really powerful tool for making safer and more sustainable products.
That project is such an awesome example of exactly the vision of the event and to get that external recognition was really cool.
A huge part of being able to bring people together across the company is making sure that you set a theme that resonates with the executives, but also, the mid-level managers because they have to be supportive of their employees actually participating in the Data Science Challenge.
Our Shark Tank style challenge, wasn't just a day or two days where people were working on a
problem with the same data set. It was actually over a longer period of time. Beginning to end, the challenge was more around two months.
There was a lot of time spent there, so people had to feel like it was worthwhile for their team.
The first theme was more general - improving EBITDA. Then the second theme was around employee experience and customer experience. Then the last one that we did in 2022 was all around sustainability and so that really resonated with everybody.
Everybody at Dow is trying to prove that they're contributing to that, and that united a lot of people to come up with some great ideas cross-functionally.
Did you come up with those themes with the executives– or the original executive sponsor?
The latest theme was brought up to me by one of the technical principals at the company who thought it would be a really uniting theme. We pitched it to the executives that we knew were already on board and going to help us.
They said, absolutely - let's go forward with it. Dow seeks to be the most sustainable material science company in the world, and so that's a very front and center theme for the company, not just the Data Science Challenge. So it's pretty easy to get executives to rally around that.
They were already interested in it, it was already on their scorecard, so might as well add this to help them achieve their goals.
Finding themes that are enterprise-level for the whole company is really important, because we want to make sure the theme doesn't exclude any one that has a certain type of job that just doesn't touch that area. Executive sponsors tend to have goals at this company-wide level.
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