As Chief Digital Officer, Peter Grambs is responsible for the all the digital initiatives at Marlabs, including the Digital practice which covers AI, IoT, Big Data, and Salesforce.com. This includes new business development and marketing as well as delivery assurance and support. Main focus areas include supporting the digital enterprise, digital transformation, and helping Marlabs’ clients achieve greater business value through the emerging digital technologies.

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Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

• What makes Peter get excited is helping his customers, delivering capabilities which will help their business, leveraging technology and putting together the puzzle which makes up people, process and technology to come up with a solution which will make their clients business better.
• Peter grew up in the Washington DC area and went to law school with the intent to enter politics. However, during his first full-time job time working for a Congress member, he realized his true path was elsewhere. He went to business school and majored in finance at Wharton School. Influenced by his father, he then found his passion in technology through their boutique IT company.
• Peter always liked being in the lead area of technology as he believes that digital is simply exploding in our economy right now. It is a perfect storm (in a good way) with big data in one hand and the technology on the other. In the past, people look at data as a tactical nuisance which is difficult to manage but now they realize that it is a strategic asset and has great benefits when you analyze and unlock its value.
• Use cases abound and are all around us. In retail, it’s understanding customer experience and what the customer is interested in, so that you can start predicting patterns and have productive conversations with them. These can also be used in financial services, fraud detection, geographic behavior, in medicine, entertainment, auto manufacturing – just about in any facet of the business, big data can be leveraged to start making better decisions to make great customer experience. It’s all about collecting the data so you can start applying the higher level analytics and IA to it.
• In terms of application, some firms have been able to apply big data analytics effectively but for a large part, people are just beginning to understand the opportunity that is out there. It going to be pervasive that data is attainable and is not hard to implement because we are getting more practitioners in the industry and this will be a core service in the business.
• Marlabs is currently working on MAdvisor, their AI platform that pulls together the pieces of the puzzle which include algorithms and big data intake in a relatively short amount of time to produce useful information from used cases. It will enable them to, in a couple of weeks, show a client insights which are locked up in their data.

Rapid Fire Questions

• What is your definition of innovation?

Innovation is doing something that no one else has thought of.

• Would you put more emphasis on the idea or the execution? How would you weigh each of them and why?

I’m big on execution but if you are executing the wrong thing, you are going nowhere so I give this a 50-50 percentage.

• What is your biggest learning lesson on your journey so far?

To do the right thing. At the end of the day, you got to do right by people and keep your values. Sometimes, you may not like the immediate consequence but you need to do the right thing.

• What is your favorite digital resource?

LinkedIn

• What is your favorite app and why?

Waze

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