Ep. 4: Daniel Smith - Opportunities Created by Data and Technology

Contact Dan Smith:
https://www.theorylane.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-smith-data-scientist/


Dan's Work:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/acid-just-sweet-80s-jeans-datapossible-daniel-smith/


Visit Dan Smith's work on Github:
https://github.com/thedanindanger


#datapossible


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:03)


Hey everybody! Welcome to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all
things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm Adam
Larson here with Mitch Roshong. And this week we covered the
topic of data analytics and emerging technologies in accounting
and finance. Mitch, can you tell us more about it? 


 


Mitch: (00:16)


Thanks Adam. Yes. So earlier this week I had a great conversation
with Daniel Smith. He is the head of innovation and founder of
theory lean integration solutions. I reached out to Dan because I
wanted to ask him a few questions about data analytics as it
pertains to accounting, but our conversation got so in depth, we
ended up talking for well over an hour. Dan offers a great
perspective on the impact technology and data have on the
accounting and finance world. I really enjoy talking with him
about these topics and I'm excited for you to listen to the first
part of our conversation.


 


Mitch: (00:54)


Being that technology seems to be very disruptive in today's
world between the jobs that it's overtaking and the economy. Many
people seem to be a little scared about these emerging
technologies. So my question for you, in your opinion, how do we
as humans prepare for a future that's kind of dominated by this
artificial intelligence or machine learning, blockchain, all
these buzz words like, that.


 


Daniel: (01:18)


I get this question a lot, Mitch. It's an excellent question and
a valid concern for anybody who's worried about that or who is
kind of on the periphery of this space. I will tell you, anybody
who's deep into this space is not that worried about it. You'll
hear a lot of doom and gloom and fear, uncertainty and doubt and
doubt being spread. This world that's dominated by artificial
intelligence, machine learning, robotics, blockchain, whatever
word you want to use for it isn't as different as people foresee
it to be. AI machine learning. Those solutions aren't giant
monolithic replacements for humanity. If you think about it as
any time that you repeat an action, something that you do over
and over again, if you try to speed it up and you feel like, Oh,
I'm gonna get so fast at doing this. I know all these keyboard
shortcuts and I know all these things and I'm going to optimize
this. That's a optimization problem. That's a locally optimizable
solution. Those are the types of things that AI can do well. It
can make a little bit of problem solving for itself. It can make
slight judgment calls, but it can't deviate from the path that's
been set in front of it. Look at it as a intern if you will. You
get an intern to do a single thing really well and make a little
bit of judgment for itself. But the second that there's a
deviation, it's going to spill coffee all over itself or do
something that's a mess. AI is exactly the same way. So we can
think of ourselves as we learn programming and as we learn basic
technical competencies, we'll figure out how we can act as
managers for AI and how we can have the business itself be
focused on deployment of these small applications and these small
things to help the business. It doesn't hurt us. We just have a
different skillset that we're using to benefit the business or
benefit or even do business for us. So it's not scary. It's just
a little different, which also can be scary until different is
normal and now it's not scary anymore. 


 


Mitch: (03:54)


That's right. So I kind of see this from what you're saying is we
need to look at this as more of an opportunity rather than
something that's scary.


 


Daniel: (04:03)


Absolutely. We should always be learning and developing our
skills. This is just another opportunity to learn and when
there's an opportunity to learn, there's an opportunity to apply
it and grow our career. 


 


Mitch: (04:18)


That's a great perspective. I really think you know, a lot of
publications coming out now, you know, there's a lot of articles
and a lot of research that's going into this and the more tools
that are becoming available to us you know, it's more stuff to
learn. But again, it in my opinion, looks like it could
potentially increase jobs and, and create new ones. So I know the
whole field of data you know, we talk about financial data more
or less in accounting. But I think there's other data that goes
into, you know, a successful business. So my question to kind of
follow up on this at what point do you kind of see maybe an
organization suffering from what people are saying is like a data
overload? How do you figure out what's really meaningful for your
business and what should be used with all of these new
opportunities? 


 


Daniel: (05:14)


Hmm so this is a great question and another one that I get a lot.
Okay. Every question is a great question to me because if
somebody's asking it, it means that they're interested. So I
love, questions, period. A lot of people don't even bother to
ask. I digress, though. I don't actually look at it as it being
anything different in the emphasis on data. Any accountant knows
that data is the lifeblood of an organization. If anybody me
present, I always talk about the data creation to value process.
How any stakeholder or business activity creates data in some
form or fashion. What we used to do and nobody thought anything
of it was we would have our general ledger, our general ledger
would take all the purchases and sales, the activity, payroll, et
cetera, all the activity of the business, put it into a
transactional system, a general ledger. We would then take that
information and we would clean and shape it. We would aggregate
it into our various financial statements and financial reports
that would then subsequently be used by business specialist to
make business decisions based on that information. Say what
volume of inventory should I order in support and
correspondingly, what should my sales budget be in order to sell
that inventory? That would result in our sales and marketing mix.
That sales and marketing mix would then result in stakeholder
activity as they purchased products, resulting in more
information that would lead to other business decisions. It's the
same thing we've always done. It's just a little faster now and
we're learning. If we can generate more data, we can create more
opportunities for making business decisions. Sometimes that needs
to be accelerated and the problems that are being created that
need to be solved through having all this data no longer fit
within the traditional bounds of an organization. Remember, all
the organizational specialties that were created were as a result
of what is effectively the accounting information process. We
only were able to put paper on a spreadsheet or a t-table or a
clay tablet, all of which are proxies for the same thing. Now
that we're in a digital environment, data has a whole new way of
moving around. So we have to reorganize. We have to have these
cross functional...