Navigating Data Science & Machine Learning: Sree Pillia

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Narrator

At a crossroads of uncertainty and opportunity. How do you navigate forward? This podcast focuses on making smart choices in a rapidly changing world. We investigate the challenges of being at a crossroads and finding opportunities that arise out of disruption. Listen in on future forward conversations with the brightest luminaries, movers and shakers. Let's navigate forward together and create what's next.

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Lisa Thee

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Navigating for podcast. My name is Lisa Thee. I'll be your host today. We love bringing luminaries, movers and shakers and innovators into your world and sharing their best expertise with you. Today we have the joy of interviewing Sree Pilla. Sree is the data practice lead for Launch Consulting and he runs our organization around machine learning and artificial intelligence.

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Lisa Thee

He comes from a rich background in industry, from Oracle, G.E. Regal and B.A. Systems, and brings a lot of that expertise in computer science and the business acumen to help our clients to demystify AI for the enterprise. So we're thrilled to have you here today. Sree, thank you for taking the time.

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Sree Pillia

Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Glad to be here.

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Lisa Thee

Yeah. Wonderful. So, Sree, can you tell us a little bit about where you're from and maybe something from your childhood that maybe sparked your interest in working in this area?

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Sree Pillia

I am born in India and moved to the US 26 years ago during my college days, information technology Master Marketing and got interested in that and focus my studies on information technologies. I have about two masters, one in computer science, and I also have an MBA from university of Wisconsin.

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Lisa Thee

Very good for someone that doesn't know a lot about your area of expertise, do you mind giving an overview of what a day in the life of somebody leading your consulting practice around data is like?

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Sree Pillia

Definitely. I specialize in application and data in I help organization to find the value of their data by providing you insight, predictive analysis, simple and easy to use. Specialization and provide What are the opportunities and improvement they need to focus using the data.

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Lisa Thee

So you are making the invisible visible for decision makers, helping to find the signal in the noise.

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Sree Pillia

That's correct. So it's sometimes it is very difficult to find the insights inside from the data and understand the value of the data for a bigger corporation or any other company. So we help doing that.

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Lisa Thee

Wonderful. What are some emerging trends that you're seeing in your field that you think as business leaders we should all be paying more attention to?

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Sree Pillia

I am looking at the emerging cloud and data platform technologies. I am focusing more on the data platform technologies at this time. So I am very much across to Microsoft Azure platform and vast Oracle Cloud and a Google Cloud pool.

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Lisa Thee

And in the Cloud technologies, what kinds of capabilities have been unlocked with exposing these technologies to a broader market?

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Sree Pillia

So be a bit of a better platform technologies, data visualization technologies, data science, AI and on the data platform side, and building the best athletes that are leagues. And because of our policies with this technology as well, and also specializes in some of the transforming the business into the cloud ERP application system.

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Lisa Thee

Very cool. I know in some of the work that I've had a chance to participate in with your team at launch, we've been able to do some focus in the areas of confidential computing and helping fields that have regulated data, be able to glean insights from it without violating the privacy of their users. Do you have any thoughts for us on ways that you see that evolving over time and being able to make sure that we walk the line of balancing privacy with also benefiting organizations and populations by being able to collect wisdom from the information?

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Sree Pillia

Yeah, so you're very engagement be engagement B specializes in data privacy, data security and better governance. One of the key things we do and we would do probably that our client may not be asking that one, but in our solution we embedded that one in all the solutions we provide for the clients. So we provide the layered security so that based on that role in anybody's role in that organization, they would be able to access the data what what's pertaining to them based on their job roles.

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Lisa Thee

Cool. What achievements are you most proud of?

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Sree Pillia

So I have been awarded us some of our top analytics leaders in the world. That was in all August 2021, so I'm really proud of that one. And I also got an award. I talked to Open Award for the best implementation of the technologies around the world. So I'm proud of those two awards, the Dysart really international awards.

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Lisa Thee

That is definitely something to be very proud of. Congratulations. What is your why? What inspires you to bring your best self to work?

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Sree Pillia

So I inspire to provide solutions to the clients. And when I try to give the clients solutions for the clients or their complex problems, that gives me a great inspiration to work. And I try to provide a simple solution for what I call issue.

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Lisa Thee

So service leadership, making sure it's accessible to all the people that need to help get something unstuck.

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Sree Pillia

That's absolutely.

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Lisa Thee

Very cool. What's the hardest lesson you've learned in your career unlocking value for people and how do you navigate and grow from it?

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Sree Pillia

So the biggest challenge I always face is the change management, you know, the organization, especially when doing the transformation. You know, there are people who are reluctant to do the change. So we had to explain to them why. This is why we need to do the change, why the way they were doing business previously may have to change a little bit for the modern world and changing world.

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Sree Pillia

So the change is the most difficult thing I found too. I'm not.

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Lisa Thee

Yeah, I can relate to sometimes having some not invented here syndrome myself. Right. Change is hard, but it happens to you. Do you have any tips for navigating through that?

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Sree Pillia

Yeah. So the process I think is that I guess blame to them why we need to change. But what's the cost of not doing the change and what is why we need to make the change. So then I explain to them all the whys. People really understand why they are not that my they need to change and it's really easy right from there.

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Lisa Thee

Yeah. Once people can connect it to how it's going to help their mission, their company, their their own career success, that usually gets them unstuck.

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Sree Pillia

That's correct.

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Lisa Thee

What advice would you give your 18 year old self about entering the workforce, knowing what you know now?

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Sree Pillia

You know what you what you see now is going to change? You know the people when I was growing up, people talking about going into the more, you know, the products, they're just moving to the world and everything. So now we are talking about us space exploration, space tourism and everything and that becomes a reality. So now we are talking about flying God.

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Sree Pillia

So, you know, probably the next would be years that are going to become reality. So what do you see now is going to change?

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Lisa Thee

Yeah, it's a it's a great time to be a lifelong learner, isn't it?

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Sree Pillia

That's correct.

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Lisa Thee

How do you keep your key priorities on top of mind to the leadership that you're working with when you are relying on them to help keep the organization motivated?

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Sree Pillia

So I look at the priorities. What's the most important foreign organization? What gives the biggest outline for the organization? So I prioritize based on that one. And then I do coordinate with all the stakeholders on if there's any change in priorities as well. So it's very transparent to everybody involved. On if there's any change in priorities because of the organization's new requirements.

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Lisa Thee

Yeah, I oftentimes find even as an internal employee at a large corporation, I came from a background of that being able to look back to the corporate mission statements and understanding the annual report can sometimes help us make sure that we are doing projects that align with the biggest value. Right.

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Sree Pillia

That's correct.

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Lisa Thee

Yeah. So Sri, what are some examples of some work that you've led at launch that help maybe a client that wasn't sure where they could benefit from applying data science and machine learning to and what kind of results were they able to get?

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Sree Pillia

I don't want to give them the specific name of the client. So we were working with the one of the largest software company and we were doing the data science for that company and we were also doing a team on doing some work for our modern analytic services for a manufacturing company, global manufacturing company, and we are still working with them and we are able to engage success with that company as well on providing more and analytics capabilities, bringing more analytics capabilities to this company.

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Lisa Thee

So if there are be a large software company, why would they need a consultancy to help accelerate their vision? What what is the benefit of bringing in some outside eyes?

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Sree Pillia

So we provide a different view for the data science capability so that the software company must be able to adopt to that one. So that's one of the that's the. And they are interested in lots.

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Lisa Thee

Yeah, I'll bring you some of that. Entrepreneurs real lens to the problem accelerating some quick starts and MVP is an innovation.

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Sree Pillia

And plus the industry experience.

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Lisa Thee

Yes very much so. Well wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today, Sheree. We really appreciate it. Where can people find you and keep tabs on what you're working on?

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Sree Pillia

You can find me in not professional networks like LinkedIn or any other social media networks. And I think part of the conference is in New York and probably I might be one of the spokespersons building that conference as well. And so people can find me there.

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Lisa Thee

Wonderful. Thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it.

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Sree Pillia

Thank you.

00:10:51:05 - 00:11:02:07

Narrator

Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to the Navigating Forward podcast. We'd love to hear from you. At a crossroads of uncertainty and opportunity, how do you navigate forward? We'll see you next time.