The Secrets of Data Science Deployments

Much attention is paid to data science and machine learning as an effective means for getting value out of data and as a means for dealing with the large amounts of data we are accumulating at companies and organizations. This has gained importance with the major waves of digitization we have seen, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic accelerating digital everything. However, in reality, most machine learning models, despite achieving good technical solutions to predictive problems wind up not being deployed. The reasons for this are many and have their origin in data scientists and machine learning practitioners not paying enough attention to issues of deployment in production. The issues range all the way from establishing trust by business stakeholders and users, to failure to explain why models work and when they do not, to failing to appreciate the importance of establishing a robust quality data pipeline, to ignoring many constraints that apply to deployed models, and finally to a lack of understanding the true cost of production deployment and the associated ROI. We discuss many of these problems and we provide what we believe is a pragmatic approach to getting data science models successfully deployed in working environments.