Madhumita Mund Rao: Assisting Businesses to Drive Data-Driven Decision-Making and Innovation

Madhumita Mund Rao is a globally recognized data and technology leader with over 20 years of experience. She leads and works in disruptive technologies such as spatial data science, data products and service development, data product management, digital data delivery and production platforms, which encompass the entire product/service lifecycle, innovating with industry-leading enterprises to create new products and product categories. She is the co-founder of Pukka Analytics Ltd., UK – MLCloudStudio, a data analytics platform, powered by AI. She is the Chief Innovation Officer of DataPitcher.com, an AI-based Data Monetization platform, and serves as a Board of Director and an advisor of KM Corporate – UK.

Madhumita has also been endorsed by UK Tech Nation as an "Exceptional Talent Leader" in Digital technology for lifetime contributions in Data and Analytics. Tech Nation enables the brightest and best tech talent globally to come and make an impact on the UK's digital technology sector. In this role, she helps Tech Nation to attract and mentor high-tech, global talent for the UK. Further, she is a non-executive Board Member of various digital startups in AI, Data, Location Intelligence, E-commerce and Cybersecurity space.

Madhumita's most recent position was Principal and Director, Global Data Engineering and Digital Platforms, Pitney Bowes Inc. from 2007 to June 2020.

Exceptional Leadership Directing Business Gains 

Pitney Bowes, the Craftsmen of Commerce, is a global technology company providing commerce solutions that power billions of transactions. Clients around the world, including 90% of the Fortune 500, rely on the accuracy and precision delivered by the company's solutions, analytics, and APIs in the areas of location data and software.

At Pitney Bowes, Madhumita was responsible for building the offshore Data R&D organization from the ground up (the largest R&D Centre of Pitney Bowes, now scaled to 600 employees in Noida and Pune offices, engaged in developing cutting-edge software, data and solutions for clients worldwide). As the global leader of Pitney Bowes Innovation Organization, she had multiple responsibilities to support the growth of the global data business.

Madhumita also led the digital transformation, Data R&D Innovation programs, product development, global data product portfolio deliveries and digital data platform at Pitney Bowes, supporting multimillion-dollar annual revenue stream. She led the vision, inception, development and launch of many revolutionary products and digital platforms, including Points of Interest and World Boundaries. These products and digital platforms enabled multimillion-dollar sales focusing on location intelligence and AdTech to many fortune 500 clients including Facebook, HMRC, Twitter, and IBM. For these breakthroughs, Madhumita received numerous PB Disruptive Innovation Awards.

Over these years, Madhumita has established and scaled truly empowered product teams. She brings to bear her capabilities of geographic information science, data-led innovation, design thinking, artificial intelligence, spatial data science, location intelligence, industry insights and technical expertise to make digital "real" in the context of the clients' markets, their customers and their aspirations.

Currently, Madhumita is on various advisory roles, assisting aspiring digital startups with their product innovation, capability building, and go-to-market strategy in the areas of geospatial, location analytics, AI and Cybersecurity.

Madhumita holds a Master's degree in Geography with Statistics from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. As part of continuous learning, she has obtained professional qualifications in AI & Business Strategy from MIT Sloan Executive Education, Executive Data Science Specialization from Johns Hopkins University, Design Thinking from Stanford University plus a fellowship in Earth Observation Science and Remote Sensing Techniques.

Implausible Journey Towards Success 

In her early career, Madhumita focused her skills on the digital transformation of data in a time when the digital revolution had just begun. Within six months of her first internship, she was leading the data and digital cartography team at a preeminent Global Australian Geoscience company. She helped create the first data innovation lab and fully digitized high-resolution geoscience/ earth observation database in the state of Orissa. In her subsequent role as an ESRI consultant, Madhumita has trained hundreds of public sector professionals and engineering students on enterprise GIS, advanced spatial-analysis. As Chief Cartographer at Eicher, she led the creation of the first National Spatial Database of India, conceptualizing and developing the first published map-book for Indian road navigation.

Additionally, Madhumita designed and developed first of its kind, high-resolution spatial-databases, analytics and production platforms. These achievements were benchmarks in the digital technology, data and GIS sector.

Driving Data-Powered Innovation

Madhumita is fascinated by data, the world of Artificial Intelligence and the boundless potential of self-learning systems. She states that the world of data has grown from a veiled, not frequently considered as a science, to an emerging economy that is highly prized and valued.

According to an IBM report, companies have historically managed assets such as property, plants, equipment, inventory, cash and intellectual property. In today's digital world, a new type of asset is emerging – data. Hence, to thrive in and benefit from the emerging Data Economy requires a new type of talent – leaders who understand the context, science and business of data, the economies of data and the use of domain specific data in an ethical and regulated way focusing on both, the social and commercial dimensions. She emphasized that the most impactful leaders in the world of data are those who understand the technical and business side of data and who are comfortable executing across many dimensions. Those individuals are most likely to lead and be the key stakeholders in a data economy.

The emerging data economy can drive value through data monetization. Data, specifically IoT data, has become a strategic asset that can be sold and exchanged. So, determining how to evaluate the potential uses of different types of data is complex and has far-reaching implications. In this way, leaders will need to evaluate their organizations' structure, go-to-market approach, and overall corporate identity through the lens of the new data economy.

"At DataPitcher and MLCloud Studio, we are attempting to democratize and monetize data in a regulated economy, powered by AI, primarily focused on Healthcare and Location Analytics," Madhumita said.

According to her, various players in the Data Economy Landscape include:

Data Presenters – UI, UX, Discovery, Engagement, Visualization

Insight providers– Statistical methods, Algorithms, Analytics environment, Semantic Models, Machine Learning

Platform Owners – Dev Environment, Cloud hosting, APIs, Device Discovery, SDK

Data Aggregators/ Data Curators – Data prep, normalization, data collection from disparate devices

New-Age Technology to Revolutionize Corporate Arena

Shedding lights on disruptive technology, Madhumita believes that Data, Location Analytics and AI will play crucial roles in today's highly-competitive business environment. The global location analytics market size is expected to grow from US$13.8 billion in 2020 to US$26.7 billion by 2025. The growing need for predictive analytics for businesses and the proliferation of location-based applications are the major growth drivers of the market.

Data and analytics combined with AI technologies will be paramount in envisaging, preparing and responding in a proactive and accelerated manner to a global crisis and its aftermath. She articulates that during these unprecedented times of COVID-19 pandemic, data leaders and organizations need the vigor, velocity and ability to scale analytics in terms of expediting time to value and innovation.

Also, it will be of paramount importance for data leaders to pay attention to the emerging technology trends to achieve sustainable growth in a data-driven organization.

Smarter, faster, more responsible AI – By the end of 2024, 75% of enterprises will shift from piloting to operationalizing AI, driving a 5x increase in streaming data and analytics infrastructures.

Data marketplaces and exchanges – By 2022, 35% of large enterprises will be either sellers or buyers of data via formal online data marketplaces, up from 25% in 2020. Data marketplaces and exchanges provide single platforms to consolidate third-party data offerings. To monetize data assets through data marketplaces, data and analytics leaders should establish a fair and transparent methodology by defining a data governance principle that ecosystem partners can rely on. www.datapitcher.com

Data Interoperability and Relationships to unlock analytics value – Graph technologies will facilitate rapid contextualization for decision making worldwide

Static dashboards will be replaced by real-time "information radiators" – These dynamic insights leverage technologies such as augmented analytics, NLP, streaming anomaly detection and collaboration.

Decision intelligence – By 2023, one-third of the large enterprises will have analysts practicing decision intelligence, including decision modeling.

X analytics (as coined by Gartner) – It is an umbrella term, where X is the data variable for a range of different structured and unstructured content such as text analytics, video analytics, audio analytics, and others. Data and analytics leaders use X analytics to solve the toughest challenges of society, including climate change, disease prevention and wildlife protection.

Augmented data management – It leverages ML and AI techniques to optimize and improve operations. It also converts metadata from being used in auditing, lineage and reporting to powering dynamic systems.