I’m going to argue that what is important is not for “Data & AI” practitioners to thrive, but for their work to be well integrated and for them to collaborate well within the organisation. Over the course of my career “AI” has drastically changed. As a newbie out of university people that understood neural nets were regarded as distinctly “odd”, by the mid 2000s that had changed to “we need more data scientists”. Today I think we are well on the way to seeing ML skills as just another skill set to integrate into your team.
Just as we have evolved from having teams of front-end and back-end engineers to integrating all skills, including UX, into our product teams. So we are also evolving to including ML, AI skills into our teams. It is just the way you need to develop compelling products.
Sure we might need a team dedicated to building a new model (a complicated subsystem team in TeamTopologies language) that serves the main product. But I think our thinking has evolved. I dont see “data & AI” skills as anything special. They are equal members of the team.
Yeah, I see your point of view. I think it's an 'and' in most cases really. Agreed, that depending on the org and the maturity of the org, there isn't a need to have folks in a single place or team. Always the challenge of writing a single piece for a multi-faceted world.
But we have software engineers spread across teams and I would still argue that you need to create an environment where software engineers can thrive if you want to build and maintain great software.
And most of the changes I suggest are agnostic of team structure or location. They will make you a stronger data & AI company no matter how distributed your workforce of practitioners are.
You make me think of the William Gibson quote 'the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet'. Sounds like you have the pleasure of working somewhere with a higher concentration of 'future' than average.
Absolutely “and” + agree on the environment for product managers, architects, engineers, AI/ML and data people to thrive. Hints of squads, tribes, practices …. not more Spotify please!
I don’t know about enlightened workplace - I think we all need to strive for a better workplace for all. I’m comfortable advocating for an ideal (some people call that vision).
I’m going to argue that what is important is not for “Data & AI” practitioners to thrive, but for their work to be well integrated and for them to collaborate well within the organisation. Over the course of my career “AI” has drastically changed. As a newbie out of university people that understood neural nets were regarded as distinctly “odd”, by the mid 2000s that had changed to “we need more data scientists”. Today I think we are well on the way to seeing ML skills as just another skill set to integrate into your team.
Just as we have evolved from having teams of front-end and back-end engineers to integrating all skills, including UX, into our product teams. So we are also evolving to including ML, AI skills into our teams. It is just the way you need to develop compelling products.
Sure we might need a team dedicated to building a new model (a complicated subsystem team in TeamTopologies language) that serves the main product. But I think our thinking has evolved. I dont see “data & AI” skills as anything special. They are equal members of the team.
Yeah, I see your point of view. I think it's an 'and' in most cases really. Agreed, that depending on the org and the maturity of the org, there isn't a need to have folks in a single place or team. Always the challenge of writing a single piece for a multi-faceted world.
But we have software engineers spread across teams and I would still argue that you need to create an environment where software engineers can thrive if you want to build and maintain great software.
And most of the changes I suggest are agnostic of team structure or location. They will make you a stronger data & AI company no matter how distributed your workforce of practitioners are.
You make me think of the William Gibson quote 'the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet'. Sounds like you have the pleasure of working somewhere with a higher concentration of 'future' than average.
Absolutely “and” + agree on the environment for product managers, architects, engineers, AI/ML and data people to thrive. Hints of squads, tribes, practices …. not more Spotify please!
I don’t know about enlightened workplace - I think we all need to strive for a better workplace for all. I’m comfortable advocating for an ideal (some people call that vision).