Information quality in the golden age of analytics

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Ron Kenett, Chairman, KPA GroupHow amazing to count Sir David Cox as one of your mentors, attributing him for the reason you pursued a degree in statistics and continuing to serve as your role model; to be fortunate to have known quality guru, Joseph M. Juran; and soon to be the recipient of the George Box Medal for outstanding contributions to industrial statistics. These are just a few fun facts about Ron Kenett. A prolific writer and researcher who also collaborates with many scientists, engineers, and other researchers on far-ranging applications in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, software and system testing, conditioned-based maintenance, information quality, and many others, we are delighted to have Ron as our featured guest on this month’s episode of Analytically Speaking. 

Ron is chairman of KPA Group, an analytics consultancy which we are pleased to have as a JMP partner.  He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Samuel Neaman Institute in the Center for Industrial Excellence, Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University Institute for Drug Research, and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is very involved in the global statistical community and is a Past President of the Israel Statistical Association as well as the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS). We are happy he made time for us while recently in the US.

Given his many publications, we thought it would be fun to look at the titles using JMP Text Explorer. We discussed some of the many things Ron has written about on aspects of quality: quality control, quality improvement, management quality, service quality, Quality by Design (for which he did a guest blog post series, The QbD Column, on the JMP Blog), a framework for information quality, and more. Here's the text analysis in JMP:

Interestingly in this era of data, Ron views the statisticians’ role as the one to ensure “quality of information,” taking a lifecycle view of analytics to achieve this—from design, to data, to analysis, to results, and to reiterating the cycle. This is central to a book he co-authored with Galit Shmueli (a previous guest on Analytically Speaking), Information Quality: The Potential of Data and Analytics to Generate Knowledge. 

Ron has authored, co-authored and edited many books. We discussed topics from several of them.  In addition to the book on information quality, we also touched on Analytic Methods in Systems and Software Testing, Multivariate Quality Control: Theory and Applications, and some topics from a new book he co-authored with Tom Redman which will be coming out in early 2019, The Real Work of Data Science: How to turn data into information, better decisions, and stronger organizations.   

While Ron is able to reflect over a long, successful career, he also sees new opportunities for analytics where statisticians can play a key role. For example, Ron has been looking at the role of analytics in Industry 4.0 and shared some thoughts on this increasingly data-intensive topic. Ever active in keeping up with current trends and topics in analytics, Ron continues to accrue awards and accolades. For those of you who may be attending ENBIS in Nancy, France, Sept. 2-6, you can see him receive the George Box Award and hear him speak more about his upcoming book.

Ron talks about this “golden age of analytics” as having attracted many disciplines. Quality information is necessary on so many fronts where opportunities for collaboration abound and where statisticians can uniquely contribute to obtaining better quality information, insights, and decisions. We hope you will hear more words of wisdom from Ron in this month’s episode of Analytically Speaking.