Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with JR Reagan, Federal Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte Services (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Your lab is now basically one that specializes in data visualization across different verticals.

JR Reagan: Yes. With innovation, we started getting called in to being more than just analytics. Now we are asked to come up with the next idea around the use of certain technologies in different ways – 3-D printing, for example. A lot of it revolves around analytics, but the innovation aspect comes in all different flavors, even in things like cyber security these days.

SM: Let’s do a few more use cases from other verticals.

JR: Another one I can think of is in the field of pharmaceuticals. A global pharmaceutical company came to us, and the problem they wanted to solve involved a combination of structured and unstructured data – a very big data format with lots of stuff. They would get complaints coming in to the call centers around the world, and these complaints would sit in a database – in a big text format and not organized in any way – and they didn’t have a way to look at them and ask, “Are there any trends in there? Is there any relevance we should care about other than somebody calling us and complaining?”

There is an example of where we used 3-Ds to visualize and mine the data. It was a very interesting visual that we presented so they could start dragging and dropping the hypothesis. “I wonder if I looked at this particular product, what are the complaints around that and who said it? Where was it?” What they found was that they didn’t know lots of the resulting insights. For example, for certain products, women in Asia would have a more adverse effect than men, or one particular manufacturing plant was having more defects than others. It was a very exploratory thing, where we would say that this data set and that visualization were giving answers to questions the client hadn’t asked yet. We were able to start drilling and mining through that. It had a big impact. Now they are planning to roll that out worldwide.

SM: Let’s do one more use case.

JR: Let’s talk about food and product safety. Using a combination of back-end text mining technologies, Hadoop and some visualization on the front end – 3-D and web technologies – we were able to put something together based on the hypothesis if there is a better way to look at food and product safety other than hearing about an event and then putting lots of people on a plane to find out what the cause of that was. It was very random initially, but it gets better as time goes on. We call it the Taco Demo, because it evolved around what would happen at a taco shack. What are the ingredients that go into a taco? Frankly, we had no idea there were so many. When you think about where the tomatoes come from, who distributed them, where they ended up, etc., and you know that taco shack number 4 had a food poisoning case, then they can start tracing that back.

It became a very relevant exercise for this particular government agency we are working with. It started to show that there is more ambient information out there that they could start looking at. People text all the time, “Hey, I am sick.” Hospitals are also collecting information. It also gave them the ability to start looking forward in terms of technologies. Products will come out and tell you the freshness of different products. But it also showed them that they needed to look at their processes differently, and that it may not be the most beneficial thing to immediately put people on planes. They needed to look at the problem first and then decide where to go. This is a great example of visualization and all the different things it can affect. Even though it might start out in the public sector world, it also has enormous effects to the private and commercial role, too. I love that story.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with JR Reagan, Federal Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte Services
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