Outsourcing

In general, we are moving away from the "not invented here" model where organizations believe that they need to build everything themselves, but there are still pockets of this view. It is the opposite view of the situation described above where some executives think that everything can be outsourced. As with most things in life, the ends of the continuum are the extreme cases and, as such, are typically found in a smaller number of organizations.

In most cases, you can outsource portions of the analytical process. Let's break it down for clarity:

• Easy to outsource: You can outsource the following activities with the lowest risk: data acquisition, data integration, data profiling, data loading, and data visualization steps are the easiest to outsource and can lower the overall cost of operations.
• More difficult to outsource and success is difficult to achieve: Feature engineering can be executed by an outside vendor if the company you...