Digital Twins and Data Scientists

Can my current team use a digital twin or will I need to invest in data expertise?

Your digital transformation is really made up of two parts. There’s the new software, tools, and digital systems on one hand, and the new people, skill sets, and specialized expertise on the other.

While much modern software is today delivered on demand and in the cloud, hiring new people to manage that software remains far more challenging. Not only does new expertise need to be identified but it needs to be attracted, integrated, and retained, usually at great cost and with great effort.

So, will the most promising of today’s digital tools - the enterprise digital twin - demand an investment in data expertise, the recruitment of data scientists, headaches for human resource teams, and slow implementation as a result?

Unlike big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning solutions, the answer is a clear no.

Too much data

In 1990 the famed computer scientist Peter Denning lamented that there would soon be too much data for him and his team at NASA’s Ames Research Center to analyze.

He wrote in the American Scientist that “the rate and volume of information flow overwhelms our networks, storage devices and retrieval systems, as well as the human capacity for comprehension,” and he wondered “what machines can we build that will monitor the data stream of an instrument, or sift through a database of recordings, and propose for us a statistical summary of what's there?”

Twenty years later, not only did the machines exist with the capacity to handle the even-larger flows of data of the twenty-first century, but the field dedicated to doing so had a name - big data - and a new army of experts dedicated to the monitoring, sifting, and analysis of this data: data scientists.

Too few data scientists

Companies set out to mine their data for the hidden value that it surely contained and data scientists were hired at an increasingly rapid rate. By 2012 the Harvard Business Review was calling data scientist “the sexiest job of the 21st century” and by 2017 IBM was sounding the alarm that there just weren’t enough trained data scientists to meet the demands of industry.

For business this meant two things.

First, there was a cost to consider. Any enterprise that was seeking to employ data scientists was going to have trouble finding people to hire. Additionally, if they did, the salaries that such in-demand employees could command would be sky-high and heading higher, with IBM reporting that paying a premium of at least 10% on top of market rates was required to attract even averagely skilled specialists. Big data was already expensive but the experts who would analyze all that data were even more so.

Second, there was an opportunity to embrace. If there were ways to unlock and extract value from a company’s own data without having to invest in big data solutions and the teams of data scientists that were required to manage them, a company could generate gains while drawing on the expertise it already had. No new hires to decipher the analytics required, just powerful but simple-to-use software.

Enter the enterprise digital twin

Enterprise digital twins represent the power, simple-to-use software solutions that companies were looking for.

With an enterprise digital twin from Cosmo Tech, you don’t need to hire a team of data scientists or invest even more in data expertise. Instead, Cosmo Tech’s enterprise digital twins presents a simulation platform so easy that anyone can quickly build a scenario, launch a simulation, and analyze the results on customizable graphical dashboards reporting impacts on key KPIs. Scenarios are simple to configure and simulations are fast to run, making the entire enterprise digital twin solution user friendly for specialists and non-specialists alike.

What’s more, Cosmo Tech’s enterprise digital twins are no big data or artificial intelligence ‘black box’. You can quickly understand why a simulation concluded the way it did and identify the critical elements in their business that could be leveraged to unlock value, improve efficiency, and lift productivity.

Even implementing the enterprise digital twin is straightforward with experts from Cosmo Tech working with your internal teams to ensure that things get up and running smoothly and that you can extract the most out of your new digital tools.

Invest in digital transformation, not unnecessary expertise

An enterprise digital twin from Cosmo Tech enables your business to unlock the value in its data and operations quickly and generate a return on investment without investing in new data scientists or data expertise.

By avoiding the ‘black box’ approach of competing artificial intelligence and big data offers, by presenting the results of simulations on easy-to-read dashboards, and an enterprise digital twin remains transparent, simple to use, and by offering a platform that is user-friendly from the outset, your can start unlocking the value in your business from day one.