The Wonderful World of Corporate

This week I discovered that for having two parents that have spent the majority of their lives working in the corporate sphere I am remarkably ignorant of the corporate world's functionality. And I guess that after a lifetime of limited exposure to the consumer aspect of business life that this should not be such a surprise.

Over the past week I've been exposed to a number of facets of the modern business. From lectures on employee efficiency to conferences calls with heads of IT I have learned much about the internal structure of modern corporations.

This is a key feature to understanding how businesses use data analytics. Many different departments work together to produce useful output. R and D must interpret data and identify significance, Engineering must figure out how to manufacture this change, Marketing must find a way to publicize this technology. All these independent sub-units must cooperate and listen to each other to develop a useful product.

Information sharing is crucial for cooperation and it brings many issues to the table. Even the simple communication of data is complicated. Data may be in Excel Spreadsheets while the analysts might want to look at it in R. Getting many people from many organizations on the same page is a difficult task and involves much communication so that services can be smoothly rendered. And all of these things coalesce to make the corporate network a spiderweb of interconnecting chaos.