Author: Rob Cotter

FM Issue: Leadership and Operations 2014

American scientist and author Isaac Asimov wrote that “science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” This is probably truer of today’s digital world with its burgeoning stock of information than ever before. Databases bulging to bursting point continually challenge us as to how we can become wiser about utilizing the vast quantum of data being amassed.

A project primed to get under way in London, England, is taking up this challenge head on. Three cultural institutions—the Barbican, the National Theatre, and the English National Opera—are to partner on Arts Data Impact, a unique initiative delivered by consultancy group The Audience Agency working with technology partner Magic Lantern that will be providing a world-first “data scientist in residence” to better understand and be able to engage the data they store.

“Arts organizations have more and more data in front of them and whether it’s marketing, social media, or Web data there are difficult problems of ‘how do you understand it?’ and ‘how do you get anybody to do anything about it?’ at the senior management or the board level,” said Anthony Lilley, CEO of Magic Lantern, co-developer of the initiative. “The data scientist in residence concept came from the position where once we have all this data, we need to think about what questions we then ask. Do we ask all the same ones we used to, or do we need to go about asking questions in different ways and, if so, do these organizations have the skills or the perspective to do that?”

Helping to hone these skills, the data scientist will spend up to a year across all three of the project partners to understand and become attuned to how they operate as an entity and then apply his or her specific data analysis prowess to them to start asking new questions and bringing about organizational change.

“Most of the data held is in marketing and sales, which is where a lot of the focus will fall, with overlaps into areas of large quantities of data such as digital media and social networking,” Lilley said. “In better understanding this data, one would then hope that for venue operations there could be greater efficiency in the way that marketing spend is used, better customer service in the sense that you’re targeting and personalizing your communications better, and in the digital area it might help affect investment decisions about how much time and effort to put into social media. Abstractly, it’ll also end up being interesting but more difficult to track into things like front of house behavior and things that play into those traditional areas of venue operations, which can take you into bar and hospitality operations.”

Alongside this broad landscape of change that could arise from the data excavation, partner facilities also believe that in making better sense of their existing data the data scientist can help them expedite and deliver on current organizational aims and begin to chart out future working practices.

“For us, understanding audiences through our data is a big, on-going project and we’re trying to build up a fuller picture of it,” said Claire Round, director of marketing and brand at the English National Opera. “At the moment, we work across about eight datasets—box office records alongside an email database, social media channels, and other routes where we talk to the consumer—and pulling these all together in a way that links and that you can make a decision from will be incredibly helpful. The data scientist will know how to structure that better with a really specialist knowledge and find the way to look at it and review it so that you make good decisions as a result. That will help us put audiences more at the heart of the business and be able to understand them rather than make assumptions about them.

“As a marketing director, I also want our CRM activities to be more sophisticated,” she continued. “I therefore think that from this project there is learning to be had about what kind of roles we want to have in the future and knowing what the marketing team of the future and its skills looks like. The digital world is having more of an impact on the arts, so there are skills that we perhaps haven’t developed as much that we will need to bring in.”

While the volume of data available and strong technological framework held by the three national-scale pilot organizations have lent themselves easily to the scope of the data scientist task, the aspects of organizational change and new skill sets for future venue management it may highlight will be of relevance to any data-holding entity or arts body seeking to optimize output from its information base.

“The data scientist is unusual enough as an idea and the partner institutions will all respond differently—the idea beyond that being that we can take the learning and tell cultural organizations that aren’t so big and aren’t so national some of the many useful lessons about how you can think differently about data,” Lilley said.

What is already clear is that the prospect of the data scientist bringing purpose and direction to a vast collection of data has already generated a positive buzz about what new wisdom might be gathered from the data stores of the participating partners.

“From evidence all over other sectors, getting better at understanding your data can actually make you quite a lot better at your job and lots of different things can become possible by being able to understand it,” Lilley said. “The outcome of this project is an input into thinking by understanding what this data might tell you.”

“While part of the project will be about pulling the data together, a lot of it is also around data visualization and telling stories through data as well,” Round said. “What the data should be doing is inspiring you to take action and not losing time at just looking at data.” FM