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Srikripa Srinivasan was a certified chartered accountant and cost accountant, and could have chosen to tie herself down a finance track after she started her career at accounting firm PwC three decades ago. But Srikripa is now vice president of Dell Global Analytics. She says she aligned her career choices in the direction in which technology evolved, allowing her to move away from routine spreadsheets and macros.She says data is the common factor binding the old bookkeeping ways with new-age, sophisticated databases. For her, it involved picking up new technologies and figuring out how to navigate her mothership finance into the new world of opportunities. And that journey evolved through stints in global majors like GlaxoSmithKline, GE and Microsoft.Today, Srikripas team of data scientists and data analysts in Bengaluru provides Dell with transformational support. The team uses analytics, AI and platforms to generate information and insights, to make the global IT hardware maker's business operations including supply-chain, marketing, sales and customer support cost-efficient and smart.Srikripa says while traditional mathematicians will continue to deliver a high degree of solutioning, the science behind presenting balanced information and insights from huge data sets can only be made possible by a data science team composed of people from diverse streams."Fashion retail, for example, is a domain where you can't just have a mathematician. You need people who understand fashion retail. So I over-index on having good data scientists from various streams," she says, underscoring the possibility of data science as a career opportunity for people who have majored in non-computer science streams.Srikripa says data scientists should be able to research data, and not get overwhelmed by data. She says they are expected to experiment and innovate. "So, fail fast, recover quickly, tweak," she says. Innovations, she says, must be impactful, and not be for the sake of innovating. "Like in Golf, if you are not scoring, you are just practising. We don't want practising innovators, we want impactful innovators," she says.Tools and AI-driven bots developed by Srikripas team help Dell's customer agents to respond to queries and resolve issues efficiently. The team has also developed intuitive tools to help Dell's sales operations. The tools predict what a potential customer may be looking to buy. The tools can also suggest products to sell under various price categories."None of this is rocket science, but when we put it in an organised manner, it makes the life of the seller much more efficient," she says.

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Srikripa Srinivasan: From chartered accountancy to data science - Indiatimes.com