You’re already using optimisation every day as a data scientist - but you probably don’t think about it. Every time you train a machine learning model, you’re running an optimisation algorithm to find the best parameters. But there’s a second type of optimisation that most data scientists never even touch - and it’s where the real business value often lives. It’s called decision optimisation, and it can transform your ML predictions into actionable decisions. Here’s the difference: ML...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Data science exists to support decision making, but within any organisation, there is a hierarchy of decisions - low stakes, high volume decisions at the bottom; high stakes, low volume decisions at the top. Executives care most about the decisions at the top. There’s valuable work at the bottom of that hierarchy. But automating routine decisions is about clearing the path so executives can focus on the high-stakes decisions. It’s not about walking it with them. For years, data science has...
10 days ago • 1 min read
Building a data science model for an academic paper is one thing. Building a model that has to work perfectly during the Cricket World Cup with millions watching is something else entirely. There’s no room for the kind of errors that might be acceptable in research settings or even standard business applications. And if you get it wrong, you get emails… Lots of emails… From people all around the world… The type of emails that begin with: “how dare you you make my team lose?!” Worse still? You...
14 days ago • 1 min read
Data science skills are like gold. And that's not necessarily a good thing. Think about it... A gold bar is very valuable. At the time of writing this, gold is selling for around US$5k/oz and (US) gold demand more than doubled in 2025. Similarly, specialist data skills, such as data science and data engineering, are also very valuable. Data roles typically command above-average salaries, and data skills are frequently included in lists of the highest-demand skills. Yet, both gold and data...
17 days ago • 1 min read
Back in my PhD days at the Australian National University, I dreamed of making an impact on the world through my work as a statistician and data scientist, but struggled to imagine how that was even possible from a city as small and remote as Canberra. Down the hall from me, one of my PhD supervisors had recently started analysing cricket data. Although this was, without a doubt, the most interesting use case being explored by any of my colleagues, getting an international sports body like...
21 days ago • 1 min read
This morning, while listening to the radio, I heard the following advice. It was directed at politicians, but could just as easily have applied to data scientists: “If they want to gain the support of the public, they need to spell out their priorities and explain what they plan to do to address them.” The commentator’s point was simple - politicians often lose public support not because their policies are bad (although this may be the case), but because they fail to communicate: What they’re...
24 days ago • 1 min read
Data science in the real world is about more than just building models - it’s about building models that work under pressure, earn trust, and avoid costly mistakes. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Yet most data science education skips right past these fundamentals. Bootcamps teach you how to code algorithms, not how to prevent bias. University courses cover model architectures, not how to build systems that perform when millions of people are watching. No wonder most data science models never get...
28 days ago • 1 min read
Welcome back for 2026! I recently came across two data science services being sold online, both by individual consultants working remotely. The first (on Fiverr) promised: "I will build you a dashboard from your data that meets your specifications." Price: $100 The second was a half-day "check-up" of a company's data capabilities, described as: "suitable for internal use when making strategic choices."Price: $10,000 Same type of consultant. Same general skill set. 100X difference in price....
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Data science bootcamps teach Python. They don’t teach you how to turn chaos into answerable questions. To this day, whenever I’m faced with a problem, the first thing I do is come up with a series of research questions - then I try to answer them. It’s standard practice in academic research, but I’ve rarely seen it done elsewhere. That experimental approach keeps me focused on what actually moves the needle. And it’s the kind of strategic thinking that gets you noticed by senior stakeholders....
3 months ago • 1 min read