ReCAP: Thor D. Osborn

Name: Thor D. Osborn

Employer: Sandia National Laboratories

Job Title: Principal Systems Research Analyst

Primary Job Functions

• Investigation, study, and data analysis to inform executive leadership regarding key business management decisions.

Date CAP Certification Was Earned

May 1, 2018
 

How did you first hear about CAP?

My supervisor, also an INFORMS member, suggested I should certify to tie a credential to my capabilities, and to show leadership in raising the professional standards of our organization.
 

Was the exam harder or easier than you thought it would be?

The exam was about as challenging as I expected. I came well-prepared, and I scored about halfway between minimum and perfect. I was surprised at the number of ambiguous questions where producing a correct answer depended on being able to gauge the question writer’s perspective, because other answers also appeared to be valid. But gauging stakeholder perspectives is a big part of successfully addressing business challenges and therefore the ambiguity is not unreasonable.

How does being a CAP help in your workplace?

I have an MBA and a PhD in biomedical engineering, but I have limited formal training in statistics or operations research. By most accounts my work speaks for itself, but sometimes clients want further assurances that I know what I’m doing. The INFORMS-sponsored, ANSI-accredited CAP certification gives me a credential I can set before them to inspire confidence and trust.

Do you think CAP should serve as a hiring mechanism? Should it apply equally to government jobs as industry jobs?

In general, I am strongly against using simplistic filters as a means of winnowing down the candidate pool. Acquisition of capable talent is already a difficult job. As one who has been on a constant learning curve throughout my career, by taking on challenges that exceeded my current knowledge and credentials, I would not wish to deprive others of the opportunity. Moreover, invention and innovation tend to occur at the boundaries of domains of knowledge, often by those who are not thoroughly trained and credentialed experts in any specific domain. All that said, I do think that it would not be unreasonable to put CAP certification into a list of desired qualities for job candidates, or to use it as a criterion for gauging promotion candidates. 

To me, being a Certified Analytics Professional means…

…that I have demonstrated broad knowledge and comprehension of the analytical processes necessary to support executive leaders with a clear and data-founded understanding of the decision spaces for challenging issues. 

What are current issues/trends/challenges in analytics that you see?

The proliferation of higher-level tools and trends toward making more data available to more people is leading to democratization of analytics. On balance this is probably beneficial, but it means that the ability to generate nice-looking results is outstripping the development of critical thinking and deeper understanding of the business ramifications of decision making. I think this proves an opportunity to help the analytics profession as well as business interests by educating executives on the fundamentals of good analysis, so that they may recognize and incentivize effective analysis while resisting lower quality work.

Another related trend that I see is the growing corporate fascination with scoreboard development. All too often these are put into place without sufficient consideration of business needs, implications of possible outcomes, or actionability in the event of undesirable outcomes. The initial phases of the analytical process – understanding the business issues and conversion of the business problems into a technically addressable form – are often overlooked in a mad rush to slap metrics on something to please upper management. This can lead people to anchor their thinking around counterproductive or thoroughly suboptimal indicators, stifling progress in the areas it was meant to help.

One more concern that I have for the future is that the current fascination with “data-driven” management and business analytics drives expectations that there will be jobs for anyone who knows a bit of programming and a few statistical tools. This will lead to an element of exponential growth in the number of analytics-oriented graduates turned out by academia, followed by a crash in which those with deep experience may be laid off while recent graduates find it difficult to land a job. Rather than turn out more degrees, I’d like to see analytics incorporated more heavily into other fields, to raise the level of discourse and the ability of organizations to properly leverage data.