Data Science vs. Domain Expertise

By Sally Starnes, Senior Manager, Invenergy Services Business Development

A frequent question raised during discussions about digitalization and analytics is: “Which is more important: data science or domain expertise?” However, I don’t think it’s the right one, as it overlooks other aspects that are critical to a successful digital strategy, such as feedback from the operations team.

These past couple of months, I’ve had the opportunity to learn more about the various Invenergy teams and initiatives, and I am especially impressed with the structure of our analytics program. Close collaboration is facilitated across five core groups that lay the foundation for adopting the latest technology and addressing new operational challenges.

1. SCADA: Invenergy’s SCADA engineering team serves as the lifeline to our analytics program, ensuring that we are measuring, collecting?and storing the right data.
2. Analytics: The data scientists, analysts?and engineers on Invenergy’s analytics team leverage available data to develop advanced analytics. Their analyses can generally be grouped?into two primary categories: anomaly detection, used to identify potential issues, and algorithms that help monitor specific, known issues.
3. Mechanical and Electrical Engineering: The mechanical and electrical engineers have?deep expertise in their respective fields, serving as subject matter experts (SMEs).
4. Availability Engineering: The availability engineering team comprises generalists, with a broad understanding of renewables systems. They serve as the direct link between operations and SMEs and between SMEs and analytics.
5. Operations: The operations team plays the critical role of closing the feedback loop, ensuring that a given analysis is working as expected and accurately reflecting what's happening on-site.

Stay tuned for my write-ups in the coming months where I’ll expand a bit further on this concept with a real-world example of how these teams have worked together to solve an operations-critical challenge.

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This piece was first released last month through Invenergy Services' newsletter, The Owner's Manual. Subscribe today!