DAIN Studios’ co-founders Ulla Kruhse-Lehtonen and Saara Hyvonen featured in the following article Do you know what you want to ask of data? by Mari Laaksonen from Media Planet 14.3.2019.
Digitalisation is creating enormous opportunities to gain insights into business and respond efficiently to new growth possibilities. But not all companies are positioned to optimise their use of data. Our DAIN Studios’ co-founders give the reader some key take home messages. Data utilisation and management must be consistent with the organisation’s strategy and vision. At the same time, operational agility is needed to experiment quickly with data-driven processes, so that management and digital leadership know what to scale, and avoid excessive piloting. At the end of the day, the courage to invest and build data and AI capabilities are likely to determine the extent of future business growth.
About Ulla Kruhse-Lehtonen
Ulla started her career as a micro-economist and moved into management and economics consulting, focusing on a variety of topics such as supply chain optimization, telco billing systems, analytical CRM, and econometric evaluations of international organizations. She made the move to the client side in 2008.
Since then, Ulla has launched, developed, and led Consumer Analytics functions in two large companies. At Nokia, she established the global Consumer Analytics Department with over 30 data scientists, providing support in sales and marketing, supply chain, and product analytics to Nokia’s 70+ local operations.
At Sanoma, as Vice President for Consumer Analytics and Insights, Ulla established and led the Analytics Center of Excellence, a 45-person unit operating in Finland and the Netherlands serving Sanoma’s media and learning business.
In 2013, Ulla was nominated the Information Leader of the Year in Finland. She holds a PhD in Economics from the Helsinki School of Economics/ Aalto University.
In March 2018, Business Insider named Ulla as one of the “32 coolest and most influential women in Nordic Tech.“
About Saara Hyvönen
Saara holds a PhD in Mathematics from the Helsinki University of Technology. After her dissertation, she did a postdoc at the University of Helsinki, mining data in a number of multidisciplinary research projects as well as teaching advanced data analytics courses. For the past 10 years, Saara has been applying her data science skills on business problems, first at Fonecta leading a team responsible for search, relevance, and automated content enrichment and later at Nokia, heading the Global CRM Analytics team.
Most recently before founding DAIN Studios, Saara was working on data and analytics strategy at Sanoma, identifying optimal data use cases and defining related requirements on data, architecture and compliance. She loves making data work by finding answers to the full range of what, why, and how questions.
At DAIN Studios, Saara is our best expert in what comes to privacy issues and GDPR.