Data Science and Sustainability in 2023 – Michael Berthold, KNIME

This is texturing TV. Hello and welcome to techstrong TV. I'm sustainability contributor Bonnie Schneider.

For those of you who work in devops devsecops cyber. And/or Cloud native your work is critical to managing and maintaining your organizations technological infrastructure. Our next guest says that understanding how sustainable data practices can drive long-term value for your business is essential especially when it comes to achieving ESG goals related to environmental sustainability and social responsibility.

I'm pleased to be joined Now by Michael Berthold, who is the CEO of Nine the open analytics platform Michael. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me Bonnie.

Well, it is great to have you here. Can you share with us more details on your background and the work you do at nine? Um, so name produces software for custom data science.

Essentially. We have two pieces there one is the source analytics plan platform that a lot of people use just to also for Education pieces to create very from very simple to very complex data science and the other pieces the commercial my Enterprise Hub, which is used to deploy that across a smaller or larger organization. So a lot of other people can also make use of whatever insights you can generate my background.

I'm a computer Scientist by training I started off doing Hardware verification and then got pulled into more data science type of stuff and I recently retired from the University of Wisconsin and of where I will head a chair for why informatics, no focusing full-time. That's great with climate change and sustainability being at the Forefront of many business agendas. Why is data science an essential part of the conversation?

actually science part of data science that in my mind is very critical to it. But the ability to really gather repeatably Aggregate and analyze data. I don't think you need sophisticated right for data science minus and applications where maybe doing image mining but it's really about making sure that you have access to all of the data that you need to constantly monitor what's going on and that's a core piece of A data science requirement.

Anyway in order to do anything meaningful with your data on a repeatable way you need to be able to get to the data aggregated and have a very reliable way to look at it. And let's talk a little bit more about the practices that helped to measure and execute sustainability progress. Can you talk a little bit more about Honda I'm works and walk us through the process.

So they've been nine books. It's a low-code no code environment. So it really allows many people without really understanding all of the sophisticated CS details underneath the hood to access data to pull data together to transform it to create essentially and that's I think for ESG project really essential be able to aggregate it and then report on it on a repeatable way so that you can look at it.

What happened last year you can see what's happening today and you can see what's happening tomorrow. For those of us that are watching and they may be unfamiliar with ESG and strategies that go behind especially on the technical side. Can you kind of just like explain a little bit about what ESG is and how it applies to the tech field?

um ESG in my mind a lot of it is I mean it kind of started off with trying to monitor you to Assumption but production essentially, but it's also now focusing on environmental environmental aspects where you get your stuff from how it was produced in your supply chain and also diversity aspects with your Workforce. So a lot of that is really first you can't really do anything about it without understanding the status quo and the status quo is something that you have to extract from data that's sitting across your organization. It's sitting of course your suppliers and it's sitting inside your HR System.

What are some of the challenges that business face businesses face when they're trying to integrate sustainable data practices into their operations? A lot of it is really understanding it first and figuring out how to measure a lot of these things right? There are companies out there that provide this kind of insight generation as a service, but they act very much as a box so you don't quite know how special is measured for instance.

Trying to figure out how much CO2 is produced by someone working from home is never something you'll be measured be able to measure exactly but you need to have some sort of a benchmark number so you can come up with an estimate of that one. All of these little factors that play into it are tended until recently to be very hidden to get access to that one is pretty complicated. So having A the data what you're actually doing what's happening inside your organization and in your supply chain and being able to then from that one.

Multiply that essentially with disinfector. So it actually get to the Wilkinson. That's the the biggest problem because in many cases you're not actually measuring the exact output or what's really happening exactly, but you're coming after the estimates.

Do you find that? There's growing demand for this interest in in measuring the data output that you were just talking about. It seems like over the past few years.

We're seeing more companies looking to be able to measure this and and quantify it. Absolutely. I mean I think for once it's simply a company's wanted to do that.

I mean at 9 we started a SWAT team a couple of years ago focusing on measuring this for ourselves simply because we're very interested in that and wanted to make sure we could reduce our impact and then of course, there's also a lot of regulations coming especially in the European side. I mean, there's already it's already clear that in a couple of years from now you need to be able to report on that as a business. Role of data science evolving in sustainability over the next few years.

We've seen this area of Interest grow in recent years and it seems also more government policies are talking about it as well, especially overseas from the program where I'm located in the US. What is your your forecast for the interest in this and demand for and going forward? I think a lot of stuff that data science has already doing is going to come in extremely handy, right?

If you do data analytics not as a One-Shot job, but you really trying to understand on a continuous basis what's going on in your customer base in your manufacturing line? Whatever you need to have a very transparent process. It's getting to data and from that data coming to decisions and that's exactly the same as you need for EC reporting, right?

You need an extremely transparent process. So you can audit what you're doing how you're measuring things. How are you pulling that together?

And how are you getting to your aggregate numbers? And that's pretty much step number one one of the most important steps for all of all data science projects anyway, and then the part about simulation is probably also going to become very interesting. I don't think the idea of being able to predict your outcome in the future is going to be that super interesting because essentially you're trying to reduce that but simulating which knobs you can twist and how they have the biggest impact on your ESG.

Numbers kpis, I think that's going to become come in very handy and that's another key discipline in data science. A lot of our viewers are people who work in the tech field and they may be interested in integrating more sustainable data practices into their operations. Can you talk about some advice that you might have for those for those people and also any apprehension they may have about making changes with digital transformation in these uncertain Economic Times.

My honestly I think for us investing. I mean as I mentioned we have this what team now we're doing quite a bit of work there. It's not really a huge expense that you have.

It's not much more expensive to be conscious about that one. It's just something make people aware of it. And then almost like gaming you don't really need to gamify it a lot but make it almost like a little bit of a friendly competition who is kind of the best citizen in the in the company that tends to help extremely.

Well and from where we are honestly, I mean for us reducing the biggest impact we can have is of course, there's a bit of electricity in the office is that type of stuff but the biggest impact that Naim has on co2 is this travel right for us reducing travel is a good thing anyway, so it kind of comes comes hand. And so I think in many ways once you start looking a little bit deeper into it you realize that it's kind of helps you build a more healthy business anyway, Is a great note to end on thank you Michael Berthold CEO of Nine the open analytics platform Michael. It was great having you on today.

Thanks for having me. All right. Well stay with us.

We'll have more on techstrong TV right after this.