A sense of urgency about data exploration and analysis – Part 1

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Sameer Vittal has 20 years of hands-on experience building industrial internet of things (IoT) solutions using ML/AI, digital twin, reliability engineering and industrial statistics and has started five data science groups during his tenure at GE.Sameer Vittal, Chief Consulting Engineer for Analytics and Reliability at GE GAS Power, explains why the energy industry embraces analytics to make decisions quickly while maintaining safety.

"In our industry, in the energy field, it’s all about the big problems the planet is facing. So the timelines for making decisions are being compressed, and that is what is driving a sense of urgency.

"For a long time, I’ve been at GE now for 20 years, I started working in an organization where we had more time to plan. We had an opportunity to go back and collect the data. And now with the sensors, with the Internet of Things and the streams of information that are coming in, the expectation is that we need to be able to react quickly. And that is part of the demand – the other part is the technology and the competition.

"So fundamentally the life cycle of products is reducing, the timelines for decision making are shrinking and you cannot compromise on safety because we build power plants, we monitor power plants all over the world. Keeping the same level of quality and service in mind, but reacting quickly, that’s become the name of the game. And so there’s an urgent sense that analytics could be one of the ways in which we can handle the work, particularly at a time like this."

Watch the panel discussion on the key elements to create and promote a data-driven culture.

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