About the reviewer

John Whittaker is a business leader, entrepreneur, and subject matter expert on leveraging emerging technology. His experience includes leadership of software, technology, and information management businesses at world-class organizations such as Dell, Quest Software, and Persistent Systems. Additionally, he has participated in building successful information security, e-commerce, and data analytics-driven products businesses from start-up through mergers, acquisitions, and IPO. John graduated with high honors from Biola University with a Bachelor of Science in Organizational Leadership and earned an MBA at Chapman University's Argyros School of Business and Economics in Southern California. John currently resides in Austin, TX, with his wife of 28 years, Rachel, and has two adult children, Alison and Matthew, and a son in law, Sean Summers, who live in California.

Acknowledgement and special thanks to John Thompson for the opportunity to have participated in his creative process for this book and for being a great friend, leader, and collaborator. Additional thanks and acknowledgement to the impressive partners, bosses, mentors, and leaders who gave me an incredible opportunity to learn and grow professionally with their guidance and example (in reverse chronological order): Chris O'Conner, Anand Deshpande, Sandeep Kalra, Mritunjay Singh, Tom Kendra, Michael Dell, John Swainson, Matt Wolken, Steve Dickson, Tim Leyden, Jon Sullivan, Mario Leone, John Taylor, Chris Andreozzi, Ron Fikert, Maria Cirino, Roger Eld, Jeff Basford, Pete Ellis, Ray Pollum, and Gene Lu.

Prologue

While writing this book, the COVID-19 pandemic has emerged and has been spreading across the world. It is a global phenomenon that has infected hundreds of thousands of people, killed thousands, and has wiped trillions of US dollars from the markets around the world. This is a health crisis of epic proportions. The scale of the human tragedy is difficult to comprehend, and many lives will be ended, and multiples of that number will be irrevocably altered. My thoughts and condolences go out to all who have lost a loved one, friend, colleague, or acquaintance.

I wish I could be assured that this is a once-in-a-lifetime event, but I am confident that it is not; the analyst in me says that it will not be the last pandemic that I experience in my lifetime. I am not one to be a pessimist or a Cassandra, but I would feel remiss if I attempted to lead anyone down the path of believing that these types of events will not happen again in the foreseeable future.

I will not spend much time on the failures of leadership in multiple countries, the US included, but I do want to point out that data and analytics has a positive, predictive, and preventative role to play in this unfolding human drama and in future health events.

Timely, accurate, and widely available data on infections, propagation, treatments, supplies, climate, recovery, human demographics, temperature readings, quarantines, self-isolation, government-mandated actions, and more is required to enable anyone who has the skills and interest to produce insights that can help stop the spread, understand the behavior of people before and after infection, and communicate to the public in a timely and informed manner.

The world needs all types of related and non-related data captured, stored, annotated, and made available to inpiduals, academics, researchers, corporations, and governments. We also need the aforementioned analytics professionals to share and publish their findings quickly and globally.

Data, speed, and transparency are our allies in this battle and all future challenges that face humanity. The behaviors that will not serve our higher good are keeping data to ourselves or our inpidual companies, not publishing findings that illuminate an element of the pandemic or the unfolding situation, not converting to the production of materiel that can help fight the virus or other future foes, and not being proactive and taking steps that seem like they might be an overreach at the time. There are other behaviors that we must avoid, but I am not trying to be exhaustive, merely illustrative.

What should we as analytics professionals and organizations be doing? We should be sharing our data, expertise, and analytical capabilities. We should be looking for a way to help locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. We need to be forward and outward looking to help our families, friends, and all of humanity in any way we can. This too shall pass, but it will not be the last time. Data and analytics can and will help, but not without our proactive and engaged effort. Let's be a community that is a force for good, for the development of insights, and for the proactive and swift end to suffering. We as an analytics community have the tools; now we need to show the will to be engaged.